Another Writer Uses "Autism" Where He Means "Selfishness" or "Amorality"

I'm getting quite a collection of examples of this sort of rhetoric, in which the writer/speaker tries to discredit someone else's political philosophy by calling it, or them, "autistic."

So far, I have a literary critic contrasting Jean-Paul Sartre's nihilism and profound alienation from other people (which he calls "autistic") with Albert Camus's more humanistic philosophy; a liberal editorial writer asking "Are Republicans Autistic?"; a liberal talk-radio host comparing Republican reliance on "talking points" to autistic verbal stims; and a liberal podcast blaming President Barack Obama's inability to overcome opposition by a vocal Republican minority on his inability to understand them, coupled with his overly scrupulous adherence to rules.

The latest addition to this group, which I saw on Emily's blog, A Life Less Ordinary?, is the author, neuroscientist and outspoken atheist Sam Harris talking about why he thinks Ayn Rand's philosophy of rational selfishness is unrealistic, morally obtuse and incompatible with actual human nature.

Here is the relevant part of that post (I'm including a bit more context for the offending one-liner than Emily did, because I'm interested in exactly what "autism" is supposed to imply here):

Many readers were enraged that I could support taxation in any form [in an earlier post on taxes and income inequality in the US]. It was as if I had proposed this mad scheme of confiscation for the first time in history. Several cited my framing of the question --- "how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep?" --- as especially sinister, as though I had asked, "How many of his internal organs can one person be allowed to keep?"

For what it's worth --- and it won't be worth much to many of you --- I understand the ethical and economic concerns about taxation. I agree that everyone should be entitled to the fruits of his or her labors and that taxation, in the State of Nature, is a form of theft. But it appears to be a form of theft that we require, given how selfish and shortsighted most of us are.

Many of my critics imagine that they have no stake in the well-being of others. How could they possibly benefit from other people getting first-rate educations? How could they be harmed if the next generation is hurled into poverty and despair? Why should anyone care about other people's children? It amazes me that such questions require answers.

...

As someone who has written and spoken at length about how we might develop a truly "objective" morality, I am often told by followers of Rand that their beloved guru accomplished this task long ago. The result was Objectivism --- a view that makes a religious fetish of selfishness and disposes of altruism and compassion as character flaws. If nothing else, this approach to ethics was a triumph of marketing, as Objectivism is basically autism rebranded. ...

And I say this as someone who considers himself, in large part, a "libertarian" --- and who has, therefore, embraced everything that was more or less serviceable in Rand's politics. The problem with pure libertarianism, however, has long been obvious: We are not ready for it. Judging from my recent correspondence, I feel this more strongly than ever. There is simply no question that an obsession with limited government produces impressive failures of wisdom and compassion in otherwise intelligent people.

This passage rests on the same assumption I noticed in the editorial "Are Republicans Autistic?", which is that autism is the same thing as selfishness. There is also the implication that to be autistic is to be profoundly ignorant of how the world works, how people are (Randians try to live by a philosophy that might work for some alien species that is 100% rational and naturally solitary, but which does not map very well onto human lives), or even the circumstances of their own lives (later in the article he mentions how much luck is involved in even the most "self-made" person's success, and alludes to people erroneously attributing to their efforts things that practically fell into their laps by virtue of their being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people, and being the right "kind" of person).

It seems to me that it's no accident that all these rhetorical uses of "autism" to characterize a deeply selfish person or worldview are cropping up at the same time the popular conception of autism is shifting to "someone without empathy." It seems to me that those two things are actually mirror images of each other; as long as people talk about autistic people as being without empathy, autism will be the metaphorical diagnosis of choice whenever someone wants to talk about an actual lack of empathy.

So the stereotype gets reinforced from both ends.

In Which I Finally Get Back to Writing About Autism in Fiction

Marti Leimbach's 2006 novel, Daniel Isn't Talking, covers a lot of the same narrative territory as the first volume of Keiko Tobe's manga series "With the Light" --- the protagonist is a young wife and mother who discovers that her son is autistic, and the story follows this pattern, more or less: 1) following her child's diagnosis, the main character goes into shock, grieves for the "normal" child she wishes she had instead, and watches her life and her marriage fall apart around her; 2) she comes out of her depression and begins to fight for her child, wrangling with various therapists, educators and bureaucrats over what sort of treatment to pursue; and 3) as she, and her allies in the school and health-care systems, and among her in-laws, begin to find schools, therapies, and accommodations that work well for her child, her life regains a semblance of order and she comes to understand her child better and love him for the person he is more than she grieves for the person he's not.

I'll review this book as a whole later, but what I want to focus on right now is Leimbach's use of military metaphors throughout this book: her protagonist, Melanie Marsh, refers to herself repeatedly as someone fighting a war against autism.

Here are some instances of this parenting-as-combat, autism-as-The-Enemy metaphor:

Stephen's uncle Raymond, that dear man, rings to tell me not to regret giving Daniel the MMR. His voice is loud in the receiver; he speaks as one who has endured early attempts at telephonic communication, who has shouted into tortoiseshell receivers fixed on wall phones, gone through operators in order to place calls. Now he tells me that in his time he has seen children die of measles; they died in droves when he was a boy. Temperatures of a hundred and six, their brains burned inside their skulls. I mustn't regret a thing.

"Please come and see us," I say to him. Raymond lives on the other side of London. He owns the same house in which he grew up and that he shared with his mother until her death some thirty years ago. He has taken me around the upstairs to show me the scars in the ceiling where a bomb came through the roof during the war. He has stood by me by the window and pointed to the areas, now dense with houses, where once there was nothing but craters and buildings in ruin. He has seen things he will not tell me about, the experiences of being a soldier. "I would not wish my memories upon you," he once said, then asked me if I could find a use for the cake pan his mother used to bake birthday cakes for him and his brother when they were children. Whether, too, I might like some of his mother's damask linen.

"I will come," he says now. "But meanwhile, you mustn't blame yourself."

"I don't," I tell him, a lie. I am fast becoming a good liar, which I discover is a means of camouflage for the protection of others, those who have not been conscripted into this battle with autism, those who have normal children, for example.

(Notice, too, the juxtaposition of Melanie's silence, as an embattled (in a metaphorical sense) Mom of an Autistic Kid with the silence of this other character, Raymond, who has fought in an actual war. He and Melanie have identical reasons for concealing their darkest thoughts from each other, and I think Leimbach's highlighting the similarities between Melanie and Raymond, and their reasoning behind fencing off a portion of their minds from other people, for those other people's protection, helps emphasize the mom-as-soldier metaphor in a way that merely explicitly stating it, as Melanie does when she says she has been "conscripted into this battle with autism," can't do.)

Another example:

"What about all these other therapies?" I ask Andy. There's art therapy, music therapy, sound therapy, therapies that involve brushing the child in order to help with "sensory" issues, not to mention many highly structured teaching practices that happen in schools.

Andy is setting out a new track [of a toy train set; he's playing a game with Daniel, who likes Thomas the Tank Engine], one that finishes at the edge of a seat cushion so the train will crash to the floor. He looks at me, then back down to the track again. He says, "You can try other things. Mostly they won't hurt him."

"But will they help him?"

He shrugs. "I'm a play therapist. And I like the behavioral approach." A flat statement, a non-comment. But it feels to me he is saying much more, that I am speaking to someone in the trenches, who has been in the trenches for a long time, who is battle-weary but full of wisdom. It is as though he is saying, "Here is the only gun that fires. Pick up the bloody gun."

Here's another metaphor that I think is related to the parenting-an-autistic-child-as-war metaphor; Melanie compares her efforts to get her son, Daniel, to speak before it's "too late" for his prognosis to improve to trying to get him out of a burning building:

To ask a person to do nothing for their child or to do very little is unfair. For them to do nothing means they have to fight the overwhelming urge to push away the danger, to run through the flames, to slay the dragon. However hopeless the situation might appear, it is infinitely more difficult to do nothing than even an ill-considered something. I knew a man whose teenage son was stabbed to death in the early hours of a Saturday night by kids his own age who wanted the sneakers he was wearing. His father had repeated dreams --- the day-and-night dreams that I came to be familiar with after Daniel's diagnosis --- in which he was there when it happened, just behind the gang as they circled his boy. There, hidden in the luxuriant green of unkempt bushes, he would be crouching. Or he stepped off the bus just in time to reach over and pluck his son, vibrant and alive, from the hands of his attackers. In his dreams, the five-inch steel blade that pierced his son's chest never so much as scratched his skin. Instead, he took his child in his arms as he had as a baby, running at a supernatural speed, flying even, not knowing where he was going but knowing it was away --- away from threat and danger and harm, away from four youths and their deadly, sharpened blade.

But the dreams were only dreams. The reality was, the boy died. The father slept.

My reality is that my child lives peacefully within a dysfunctional brain while I search madly --- tear myself apart --- trying to think for the both of us how to get out of the burning building of autism. Even using this method --- this play therapy mixed with applied behavior therapy and whatever else Andy brings to bear --- there are limitations. With every learned word or spontaneous moment of play, I see Daniel becoming more like any other child, less "autistic"-seeming, and I know that if he will interact with others as he is now interacting with Andy, with me, with [his sister] Emily, his life will not be entirely ruined by the condition. But there is also a time factor. As he develops so do all the other children around him. He has to race to catch up or never catch up at all. I understand this very well. It is almost as though someone has told me, "If he is going to escape the fire, he must do so early, before the roof caves in."

There's another comparison to armed conflict at the beginning of this quoted passage, where Melanie compares her own angst over having an autistic son to the recurring nightmares of a father of a murdered son; placing herself in the father's shoes, Melanie makes Daniel's autism into the gang of teenage thugs that took the other boy's life.

Later in the same passage, Daniel's autism becomes a burning building that he must escape --- that Melanie has to lead him out of.

All of these metaphors work to convey several things that I think Marti Leimbach was trying to emphasize with them --- Melanie's desperation, her constant feeling that something of life-or-death importance is happening in her son's life, that will determine the course of her son's life, that she cannot figure out how to wade in and help him. Her repeated use of images of battle, of sacrifice, of terrible, outsized, Herculean struggles waged on his behalf, seem like they reflect the gap between what she can do for him --- what she is doing for him --- and what she wishes she could do for him. She reaches for life-and-death scenarios to compare her efforts to, and most often she returns to the battlefield for her metaphor of choice.

While I am sure Leimbach chose these metaphors to highlight her character's sense of living under extreme circumstances, and her frustrated desire to help her son, I also see something in these metaphors that I'm not sure she meant to imply.

What all of these metaphors --- of war, of individual combat, of fleeing a collapsing, burning building --- do is they separate Daniel from a part of himself, and set that part in conflict with the whole person. To save her son, Melanie makes war on ... her son. She doesn't see it that way; she sees her war as being against the thing that has taken her son from her, but Daniel hasn't been taken from her at all. He's still there, he's just not the way she wishes he could be.

This conflict Melanie sees between Daniel and Daniel's autism reminds me of the autism-as-prison metaphor I described in my post about spatial metaphors and autism:

One thing the autism-as-container metaphor tends to leave muddled is where the autistic person dwells in this metaphorical space. It's quite eloquent on the position of the parents, peers and teachers trying to relate to this strange being --- we're given to understand quite clearly that they feel locked out and exhausted from battering at the door --- but what's not always clear is whether the autistic person is in the metaphorical Fortress of Solitude, or whether they are it.

Judy and Sean Barron's 1992 book There's a Boy In Here makes it unusually clear: Sean is inside his autism, his thoughts, feelings, desires, and self obscured from his mother's sight by his intense anger, his tantrums, his reckless, aggressive and often destructive behaviors. But in other books, like The Siege (which I haven't read) and Bruno Bettelheim's mother-blaming opus The Empty Fortress (which I likewise haven't read), it's not clear whether the walls that the authors advocate tearing down imprison the child, or whether they constitute a part of hir, like a protective cocoon or exoskeleton. The act of trying to "break through" to an autistic child becomes a violent one if the latter construction is implied ...

Melanie's understanding of her son's autism in Daniel Isn't Talking is, as I mentioned above, stuck in "But this is not my child!" mode. For her, Autism is a hostile Other that has taken, and changed, her son. Her son's autism might be a part of him, but it's a dangerous, diseased part that Melanie believes Daniel will be much better off without. Because she sees Autism as a separate, hostile entity and Daniel as its victim, she can cast herself as Autism's implacable foe without seeing any tension between that role and the unconditional love of Daniel that the maternal role demands.

Other reviews of this book: Sharon at The Voyage, Kristina Chew at Blisstree.com

More Disagreeing by Diagnosing: the Aspie-in-Chief

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Partial transcript of a podcast by two progressive political bloggers that criticizes President Obama's leadership style, which the podcast hosts believe is weak. The podcast, titled "Hey Obama, Get Your Head Out of Your Asperger's!" spends a lot of time drawing a picture of Barack Obama as a "high-functioning Asperger's" autistic, who is fixated on governing according to his own ideas of what the Presidency is supposed to be, even at the expense of governing well, or of doing any of the things the people who voted for him want him to do. Besides producing this transcript, I also critique the Obama-as-Aspie metaphor, and quote another autistic blogger's (Leah Jane) criticism that I particularly endorse.
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Leah Jane at The Quixotic Autistic linked to this Professional Left podcast from a couple of weeks ago, titled "Hey Obama, Get Your Head Out of Your Asperger's!"

The podcast couches some actually very good criticism of Barack Obama's approach to being President in some really offensive stereotyping of autistic people (similar to the instances of Disagreeing by Diagnosing I've chronicled earlier on this blog). Leah Jane transcribed and paraphrased a little bit of the relevant part of the podcast (which is very long --- almost the whole first half of the forty-minute recording), but invited other people to transcribe more of it, so I figured I'd do that.

The participants in this exchange are progressive bloggers Driftglass and Blue Gal:

Driftglass: ... I'm very disappointed in my president right now.

Blue Gal: Yep. I actually woke up this morning and had a revelation about Barack Obama that I want to share with you.

Driftglass: Ooh! Pray tell, pray tell.

Blue Gal: I haven't even put this in the podcast notes, because I want it to be fresh.

Driftglass: Well, hold on, let me "man up" so I can handle it!

Blue Gal: (Laughs)

Driftglass: Let me put on my "man pants," as the new parlance for bracing myself ---I'm girding my loins.

Blue Gal: Girding your loins. There ya go.

Driftglass: Ready, gird! Okay, go.

Blue Gal: You and I both know --- and I actually did Photoshops this week of Obama as Spock --- and you and I both know, and lots of people have said that basically, Obama is sort of on that high-functioning Asperger's end of the spectrum, of not being emotional, of being very rational about things rather than getting mad, and that's very frustrating to a lot of us.

Driftglass: Yes.

Blue Gal: But along with that --- and also, full disclosure: Driftglass and I are very familiar with what it feels like to be on the Asperger's end of the spectrum; I think I can speak for both of us in that regard, may I?

Driftglass: That's a fair statement.

Blue Gal: We've talked about that before.

Driftglass: Yes, that's a reasonable ---

Blue Gal: Obsessive interests, you know, being able to ignore everything else to the point of a fault, and so forth. But one of the things that people like us, at that end of the spectrum, often do, is focus on one little detail --- again, to the fault of forgetting the big picture.

Driftglass: Yes.

Blue Gal: --- and I really think that the Constitutional scholar Barack Obama has this little seed in his mind that the Presidency is supposed to be weak, Constitutionally speaking, in relation to the Congress, in terms of starting legislation, and so forth. He's decided that he's going to return, he's going to change the way Washington works, and what he means by that is he's going to go back to a time when the Presidency and the Congress and the courts were part of this balancing act --- you know, the three branches ---

Driftglass: (cuts in) Pre-Imperial.

Blue Gal: Pre-Imperial presidency. So I'm thinking this morning in my kitchen about, "Well, when was it that we sort of got this imperial presidency?" and I realized, "Oh, my God, FDR!"

Driftglass: Yeah?

Blue Gal: And, so, doing this is antithetical to the New Deal! You know? It really is!
Driftglass: It is. It is.

Blue Gal: And that's why we're all having such a collective freakout, like "Revenge of the Nerds," when the nerd gets elected to the presidency of the student council, and, instead of sitting down and taking over and representing the rest of us nerds, and doing what we want him to do, he sits down and takes out the bylaws, and says (speaks in nasal voice) "Well, ya know, we really have to go by the bylaws and the bylaws say that everyone gets a vote and we all have to work together on a consensus."

Driftglass: Uh-huh.

Blue Gal: And we sit there and we're like, "But wait! We elected you President because we don't want the Alpha Betas to have a voice in this! They're jock assholes! They're not gonna come up with anything that's gonna even resemble a reasonable answer to any of the problems we have." (nasal voice) "No, but the bylaws say we have to do it this way." (resumes her normal voice) And the collective freakout from the progressive base, is, "Oh my God! He's going by the bylaws! Stop it! Stop it! Stop him now! We want you to be an imperial President. We want you to be strong."

Driftglass: He's an originalist. He's a Constitutional originalist; the first branch of government is the Congress.

Blue Gal: Yeah! And they're the ones that originate legislation.

Driftglass: Yeah, absolutely true.

Blue Gal: And, as someone who came fresh out of the Senate --- you know, was really in the Senate for a very short time --- and being the Constitutional scholar that he is --- but the other thing about this "Aspie" thing, this Asperger's thing, is, two things: One is, I think Barack Obama really has faith in America, and thinks
that America can survive anything. We survived Reagan. But I think he really has fundamental faith in America to survive anything, and so it's perfectly okay for him to conduct this experiment, and I really think he's conducting an experiment now, in his head. Let's go ahead and really do this Constitutional thing of letting the Congress have more power.

Driftglass: Yeah.

Blue Gal: And I think he realizes that, the people he's dealing with, they're Republicans, you know?

Driftglass: Yes. Well, there's the fly in the ointment, isn't it?

Blue Gal: Yeah! The fly in the ointment is, they want to destroy him. And he doesn't care because he's gonna conduct this little experiment in Constitutional originalism --- it's almost ironic in terms of the Tea Party always talking about defending the original Constitution, which to them means "we only have white men for President" ---

Driftglass: The Second Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, and nothing else.

Blue Gal: --- but the real Constitutional originalist is Barack Obama.

Driftglass: That's a very interesting revelation.

Blue Gal: And it's intellectualizing it like that that distracts me from wanting to (bleep) Congressional offices, damn it!

Driftglass: Okay, you'll have to, uh ---

Blue Gal: I think I'll have to edit that out.

(Both laugh).

Blue Gal: It's a joke! It's a joke. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Driftglass: Send them a very firm letter.

Blue Gal: I'm going to send a very firm letter, too!

Driftglass: Well, I can understand that point of view. I can respect that point of view. You raise a very interesting point, that he is conducting his presidency as a mediator among the branches of government, and as a modest, confirm-or-deny kind of person, but [one] who doesn't originate. And that is what the Constitution generally says a President should be.

Blue Gal: We're so not used to this, because, when I teach middle-school U.S. history, it's all about who was President. You start there, with U.S. history.

Driftglass: Of course.

Blue Gal: "Okay, when FDR was President, this, this, this and this happened." You don't start with, "The great Congresspeople of 1945, how brave they were!" You know? You don't go there! That's not how we think of history.

Driftglass: So he's essentially gone to the House basement and pulled out this 200-year-old machine, and said, "I'm going to oil it up and get it running again and make it run the way it was originally intended to run." That's a very interesting theory, and I think that we could spend probably the rest of the podcast talking about it.

Blue Gal: I think so. Yeah.

Driftglass: But if I'm that guy, then Step One is, I stop torturing people.

Blue Gal: Yeah. Yeah.

Driftglass: Step Two, I close down secret prisons. If you really ---

Blue Gal: And that's it. I think that's where he fails his own experiment.

Driftglass: He does.

Blue Gal: Because, there are areas --- particularly during the Bush administration --- where presidential power just exploded.

Driftglass: And he wants to hang onto that.

Blue Gal: He wants to hang onto that! You can't have it both ways.

I do think there might be something to Blue Gal's notion that Barack Obama, the Constitutional scholar, might be deliberately not being as strong a leader as he could be because he believes the Presidency *should* be weak. Of course, there is a conflict there with his keeping in force all the totalitarian measures his predecessor adopted after 9/11, using a vague Terrorist Threat to justify all manner of surveillance-state excesses --- and Driftglass and Blue Gal catch that inconsistency, and acknowledge it. They make some other criticisms of Obama's leadership style that I think carry a lot of weight, like his persistence in believing that the extremists who've largely taken over control of the Republican Party (in what I think of as a two-stage process that began with the anti-Clinton Republican Revolution of 1994, which gave us Newt Gingrich, and has culminated with the current anti-Obama backlash) will move even one nanometer to the left in order to compromise with him --- even if he moves a mile to the right first, as a gesture of good faith. Driftglass also makes a good point that Obama is not only President, he is also leader of the Democratic Party, and he is abandoning this second responsibility. I also appreciated their discussion of the long historical roots* of the "imperial Presidency" that they suspect Obama of wanting (if not quite wholeheartedly) to abdicate.

But this "oh, the President is an Aspie, that's why he's so 1) emotionless, 2) naive and 3) stubbornly committed to principle at the expense of realpolitik" thing, that's the part I didn't find particularly helpful or illuminating.

I thought Leah Jane put her finger on the biggest thing that's wrong with this use of autism-as-metaphor:

[W]hen the American people were at an all time euphoria about Obama, he was compared to Spock, and Superman, and other idols of nerd culture, but the "A" word never came up. Now, progressives are finding a few walloping things wrong with his decisionmaking and snubbing of progressives, and now it's so convenient to label him with autism or some other "disorder" or invisible disability. Disability need not apply to people when they're doing what you think is right, but the moment you find fault with them, disabilities begin to be thrown about, and always the negative stereotypical traits are thrown in too. Never would it be suggested (at least while he is alive, see Einstein and Newton) that Obama has Asperger Syndrome for an exceptional trait which makes him a fine leader. Always focus on what makes them different, not good. Same for Narcissistic Personality, or Psychopathic Personality, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or now, Asperger Syndrome. Yay. Or just happily labeling anyone who disagrees with you as part of the Loonie Left, or a Wingnut, or a Right Wing Nutjob, having "Nazi Tourettes," having some type of ADD or ADHD, or a Crazy [insert noun], or Republitard.

How delightful to know that the mentally and intellectually disabled are so disposable.

I remember this, too: during the campaign and shortly after he became President, people would use words like "cerebral," "rational" (or "hyper-rational," if you're fond of superlatives), "intellectual," "professorial," or talk about his desire to transcend partisanship, or dirty politics, or whatever; the image was of a guy who practically embodied Reason and Idealism and Moderation in All Things. And we did not use a psychiatric diagnosis to convey this image; we used mere adjectives. Now that some commentators see these same traits as flaws --- as impediments to his being an effective President --- they describe them in psychiatric terms. What were character traits or habits are now symptoms.

Using metaphors like that --- comparing some trait, or philosophical stance, or policy position, in a politician to a DSM diagnosis --- does two things. First, it marginalizes and delegitimizes the person you're talking about, since whatever they say can (and usually is) just be used as further evidence of their incapacity; and second, it feeds the stigma against people with that particular diagnosis. There's already a stereotype that autistic people are never leaders, never politicians, because of our total lack of social skills; if "autistic" or "Aspie" become common insults for a leader who is seen to be ineffective, the stereotype becomes stronger (and also, more specific to political leadership). Young autistic people trying to find something they're good at and want to do with their lives might assume they can't go into politics (even if they might want to, or have an aptitude for it**), or people in a position to hire, say, campaign workers might choose not to hire anyone who says they're autistic, or who looks autistic, because they've gotten the idea that autistic people don't belong in politics.

*I wonder if, based on some things I've read at Arthur Silber's blog (start with this nine-part series on "Dominion Over the World" and follow links to his other writings on the history of American imperialism, if you've got lots of time and an intense interest in this matter), if this overpowered executive branch might not be even older than they seem to think it is --- if maybe it didn't start with Woodrow Wilson (or earlier --- you wouldn't call Teddy Roosevelt a passive, retiring, conciliatory sort of leader, would you?) rather than Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wilson was also a very active, aggressive President who embroiled the nation in bloody, imperialistic wars that it had no need to fight (in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Russia, according to Wikipedia; he also ultimately made the choice to involve the U.S. in World War I). But Wilson in particular seems to have done a lot of the thing that I had previously thought started with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that kicked off U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War: using executive power to declare war without ever formally declaring war, which the Constitution allows only Congress to do.

**Which some of us do!

In or Out? Using Spatial Metaphors to Describe Autism

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: People often use spatial metaphors to talk about autism. Ian Hacking, in his article "Autistic Autobiographies," points out that autistic autobiographies are often described (sometimes even in their own titles) as attempts to "go inside the mind" of their autistic authors. That expression compares "the autistic mind", which is usually considered interchangeable with the author's own mind, to an exotic foreign country rarely visited by outsiders. I would add a few other categories of spatial metaphor to Hacking's observation: first, autism (not "the autistic mind," but Autism itself, whatever the speaker imagines that to be) as foreign country; second, autism as fortress, prison cell or container --- the autistic person is "inside" while the world is kept "out" --- and third, autism as vast, uncrossable distance between people. I think all of these metaphors can be seen as outgrowths of a larger metaphor that linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson discuss in their book Metaphors We Live By: that metaphor compares communication to sending physical objects from one person to another through physical space.
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I've noticed this trend for a while --- the trend of speaking and writing about autism like it's a place or a container that you can be inside or outside of --- and have long been planning to write about it, so I figure I might as well (start to) do that now.

The philosopher Ian Hacking mentioned this as well in the talk he gave at a 2008 conference on cognitive disability and moral philosophy, which has now been rewritten as an article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, on autistic autobiographies, parents' stories of raising their autistic children, works of fiction featuring autistic characters, and the media and journalistic commentary about all of these, and about autism in general.

My own list of autistic fictions has approximately 200 books, and counting. Especially important are the stories for children, some for autistic children, some for non-autistic children, and some for all children. They take great pains to describe behaviour and thereby serve as role models. The young adult category is also influential in determining what autism is like and in some sense should be like. They illustrate 'the norm' and thereby help stabilize what the norm should be. Detective stories, spy thrillers, science fiction, gothic horror and Harlequin romances all help to reinforce a way of talking about autism.

(The article, as it appears in print, is titled "Autistic autobiography"; in lecture format, it was called "How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism." I think the latter title is more accurate, since Hacking deals with conceptions of autism in non-autobiographical writing as well, even though he does spend lots of time on autistic autobiography and award it special significance).

The story-tellers learn from autobiographies how to tell their tales. But that is a two-way street. Temple Grandin's Emergence was written before the genre got underway, so her self-descriptions are unaffected. Today's autistic child, brought up on children's stories about autistic children, and who in later years goes on to write an autobiography, will give accounts that are textured by the early exposure to role models.

Hacking goes on to list examples of one particular metaphor that recurs throughout autism autobiographies, and especially in the text used to describe them: the back-cover snippets, the capsule summaries, reviewers' summation, etc. --- the expression of going 'inside' autism. Sometimes autism might be a container or vessel, with mysterious contents that are only now being revealed and made accessible to us, the readers; sometimes it's a place we can visit.

In his foreword to Grandin (2005) [link], Oliver Sacks wrote that her previous book, Emergence, was

Unprecedented because there had never before been an 'inside narrative' of autism; unthinkable because it had been medical dogma for forty years or more that there was no 'inside,' no inner life, in the autistic. (Sacks, foreword in Grandin 2005, p. 11)

Even before we dip into these books, we find that word 'inside' over and over again --- on their covers. On the back cover of a current paperback of Grandin's (2005) Emergence:

A remarkable story ... uniquely valuable in helping us to see autism from the 'inside'.

A quotation from People magazine on a paperback of [Donna] Williams' Nobody Nowhere [link]:

By turns fascinating and harrowing ... a riveting autobiography that describes how autism feels like from the inside.

The subtitle of Mukhopadhyay's (2008) [link] is:

Inside my Autistic Mind.

The subtitle of the American edition of Tammet (2006) [link] is:

Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant.

'Inside autism', in such phrasings, tends to be used more or less interchangeably with 'inside [Individual Autistic Person]'s mind', which Hacking finds terribly problematic:

When 'inside' connotes written or spoken by a person with autism, and 'outside' connotes written or spoken by an observer, parent, clinician or friend, then the metaphor is benign. But it is also, once the point has been made, rather banal, and hardly worth the constant repetition we have encountered.

Aside from such benign uses, I am cautious about 'inside the mind', for reasons presented in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This is not the occasion to argue the case or even sketch what is at issue, but it does motivate my approach. It is certainly not a hankering after behaviourism.

A first danger of the 'inside' metaphor needs only be stated to be scotched. It is the idea of 'a unique insight into the autistic mind': as if 'the autistic mind' were a species of mind. Our four autists [Temple Grandin, Donna Williams, Daniel Tammet and Tito Mukhopadhyay] have very different minds! Grandin described herself as thinking in pictures. Mukhopadhyay is dominated by sounds. Tammet sees abstract objects in colour. Hence Williams' (2005) metaphor of autistic spectrum 'fruit salads'. To quote a common adage: 'If you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person.'

Talk of getting inside the mind of another is apt in its place, but unreflective use out of context often suggests a misleading picture of mental life. It suggests that looking inside is much like looking outside, in the way that looking inside a cardboard box after opening it is no different from looking at it from the outside, except for a change in point of view. This goes along with the sense that our own minds are transparent to us (subject to Freudian reservations). We look inside them all the time. That generates the question of how we ever know what is going on in the mind of another person.
...
There can always arise particular difficulties in understanding another person. But the puff writers who talk of getting into the mind of an autistic person do not, for a moment, think that there is the same general question for most people, as there is for autists. I cannot recall an 'inside the mind' (or any variant thereof) being written on the cover of any non-autistic autobiography that I have examined lately. It could certainly occur, of course, with a biography. 'Finally we have got inside the inscrutable mind of Vladimir Putin.' But that is not the norm.

I have more to add to Hacking's cursory listing of examples of the 'inside autism' metaphor:

The subtitle of the anthology Women from Another Planet? is "Our Lives in the Universe of Autism".

The synopsis on the back of my copy of Judy and Sean Barron's There's a Boy In Here (Simon & Schuster, 1992; hardcover) says, "Autism From the Outside In... / ... And From the Inside Out"; on the front cover there's the text "A mother and her son tell the story of his emergence from autism." The jacket text of There's a Boy In Here is especially full of in/out metaphors:

[T]hough nothing seemed to work, [Sean's parents] sometimes caught fleeting glimpses of the helpless child inside the stranger who shared their home. They were determined to free him, and somehow their love, their rage, their patience, their sheer humanness reached him at last ... [H]e remembers ... the terrifying isolation, the desperate desire to reach out ... until his family's indomitable and courageous resolve finally released him. ... [T]he poignant self-portrait of a boy trapped in a maze of compulsion and obsession.

In Nobody Nowhere, Donna Williams talk about living in "[her] own world" as a child; she draws a distinction between her world and The World, which is outside her, around her and mutually exclusive with her world. In a poem that acts as an epigraph to the book, she writes of "a world under glass" where sensations are dulled, and you think nothing can reach you, but where you're utterly alone:

In a world under glass, you can watch the world pass,
And nobody can touch you, you think you are safe.
But the wind can blow cold, in the depths of your soul,
Where you think nothing can hurt you till it is too late.

The titles of a lot of books, too, reflect a spatial metaphor: There's a Boy In Here; Emergence; The Siege --- all of these rely on a metaphorical understanding of autism as something that people become trapped in and have to be rescued, or rescue themselves, by a heroic effort (their own, someone else's or both); autism is not only a place, it's a place that's very hard either to get into from outside or to get out once you're inside. Autism as Death Star.
A later edition of There's a Boy In Here has the subtitle "Emerging from the Bonds of Autism."

Finally, all the images I have included in this post appeared when I did a Google Image search for "autism" --- all were illustrations for (sometimes mis-)informational websites on autism. I chose ones that I felt reflected the metaphor in a visual way: metaphors are not just for verbal thinkers!

Particularly, I feel there are subspecies within this category of metaphor that are worth identifying more precisely. Right now, I can think of three:

(1) Autism as prison cell/container
(2) Autism as (very large) distance between people
(3) Autism as unknown territory

I would also date the usage of the parent metaphor to all three of these --- autism as a discrete part of physical space --- earlier than the earliest autiebiographies; there was writing about autism for some decades before Temple Grandin wrote her first book, Emergence. While this earlier writing may or may not have influenced her way of thinking about her autism, it had certainly been informing the larger culture into which her story has become assimilated.

Even the title she chose for this work partakes of the metaphor whose ancestry I'm trying to trace here --- what is she emerging from? Is it autism in general, or one particular aspect of it she had to transcend to come into herself?

(This latter possibility occurs in Dawn Prince-Hughes' much-later autiebiography, Songs of the Gorilla Nation, in which she describes herself moving within the metaphorical terrain of autism, from its dark regions into its "beauty." So that's another possibility for the autism-as-geography subtype of autism-as-place/container: movement occurring within "autism". It also raises the possibility that "autism" is not a flat, uniform piece of terrain, and that different autistic people might inhabit different parts of that vast country).

Anyway, before Grandin wrote her hugely influential works, there was already a body of literature on autism: books written for popular consumption by clinicians, and personal narratives by parents of autistic children, of which the oldest is (as far as I know) Clara Claiborne Park's 1967 book The Siege: A Family's Journey into the World of an Autistic Child. Both the title and subtitle suggest that Jessy Park's autism is a physical place to be ventured into; calling that process a "siege" implies that this hidden realm has walls that its besiegers have to breach, and defenses they have to overpower; that autism is not always an inert landscape -- however forbidding --- but sometimes actively resists exploration.

One thing the autism-as-container metaphor tends to leave muddled is where the autistic person dwells in this metaphorical space. It's quite eloquent on the position of the parents, peers and teachers struggling to relate to this strange being --- we're given to understand quite clearly that they feel locked out and exhausted from battering at the door --- but what's not always clear is whether the autistic person is in the metaphorical Fortress of Solitude, or whether they are it.

Judy and Sean Barron's 1992 book There's a Boy in Here makes it unusually clear: Sean is inside his autism, his thoughts, feelings, desires and self obscured from his mother's sight by his intense anger, his tantrums, his reckless, aggressive and often-destructive behaviors. But in other books, like The Siege (which I haven't read) or Bruno Bettelheim's mother-blaming opus The Empty Fortress (which I likewise haven't read), it's not clear whether the walls that the authors advocate tearing down imprison the child, or whether they constitute a part of hir, like a protective cocoon or exoskeleton. The act of trying to "break through" to an autistic child becomes a violent one if the latter construction is implied, but, for Bettelheim at least, it would be logically impossible --- a bad metaphor, to say the least --- for anything to be in the "empty fortress", so it looks to me like the only way to interpret that one is that the autistic child's mind is the fortress, and Bettelheim was trying to tear it down and rebuild it to his liking.

Sometimes autism might be spoken of metaphorically as distance; I listed this as a third subtype of the autism-as-place metaphor, since in this case autism is not where the autistic person is so much as it the space between the autistic person and everyone around hir who isn't autistic, but now that I think about it more I've decided it functions more or less identically to the autism-as-container subtype. In both, autism is the barrier between the autistic person and the people seeking to understand or relate to hir; in both, the barrier must be overcome.

The autism-as-distance and autism-as-container subtypes of the autism-as-place metaphor also seem to me to be related to the larger, implicit metaphor described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By: the "complex metaphor" of communication as sending bits of meaning packaged in language along a conduit to another person. If communication is thought of as analogous to sending things through space, it makes sense that anything that makes communication harder (like a difference in neurotypes between sender and receiver) will be translated into this metaphor as a physical barrier.

More on Disagreeing by Diagnosing

Via dkmnow on the Autism Hub email list, I found this odd article on CommonDreams.org, provocatively titled "Are Republicans Autistic?"

The usage of "autism" in this context --- by a left-leaning website, seeking to explain behavior (by Republicans) that seems bizarre to that website's audience (Democrats, other miscellaneous liberals and progressives) --- did not fill me with hope for an unbiased, unsensationalized portrayal of autism. Not at all. Indeed, from the title alone I expected a conception of autism heavily influenced by stereotypes, particularly the eternal-child stereotype, the lost-in-our-own-worlds stereotype, and the fallacious notion that atypical development means no development at all.

I was not far off:

The word autism was first used in 1911 to describe human behaviors so self-centered as to suggest failure to process the realities of the outside world in language, and an inability to relate to other humans. In the 1940s the symptoms were defined further as social withdrawal, difficulty in communicating, extreme self-absorption, and repetitive or stereotyped behaviors.

Now called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), it is generally agreed that people with ASD have few linguistic, social, cultural or logical constraints to manage their lives. A current definition adds "... people with ASD have difficulty seeing things from another person's perspective. Most 5-year-olds understand that other people have different information, feelings, and goals than they have. A person with ASD may lack such understanding. This inability leaves them unable to predict or understand other people's actions."

Historically, severely afflicted individuals have been burnt as witches, honored as shamans, hanged or incarcerated for crimes, or celebrated as geniuses. Adolph Hitler, Thomas Jefferson, Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Darwin, Wolfgang Mozart, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski, Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Charles Richter, and Ludwig Wittgenstein have all been labeled autistic by one or another critic.

The language used in this passage --- citing "self-centered"* behavior as the characteristic feature of autism, for example, or saying autistic people lack "linguistic, social, cultural or logical constraints to manage [our] lives " --- draws strong, if implicit, parallels between autism (a neurological condition) and selfishness (a moral quality).

This rhetorical sleight of hand is more pronounced when consider how the title question --- "Are Republicans Autistic?" --- fits into a tradition of progressive critique of conservatism by seeking to explain the psychology of conservatives. The best example I can think of is Erich Fromm's (and, later, Theodor Adorno's) work on the "authoritarian personality," which postulates that the people who have the most difficulty dealing with personal freedom will tend to seek security in a strong leader, who will make all the hard decisions for them. (While Fromm thought this anxiety in the face of freedom was something everyone felt, to varying degrees, and that authoritarian character types could be found within all political ideologies, some of the theorists who came after him linked authoritarianism specifically with right-wing politics).

So, bearing all that in mind, the simple question "Are Republicans Autistic?" morphs into this string of propositions:

1. Republicans are selfish, blinkered, disconnected and unempathic.
2. Republicanism is no longer an ideology to which a mentally healthy person could subscribe.
3. Because Republicanism is crazy, Republicans must be crazy as well, or they'd leave the party.
4. Autism is a pathologically extreme form of self-absorption.
5. Self-absorption characterizes the Republican psychosis; ergo, maybe Republicans are autistic!

Believe it or not, the article's handling of autism only gets worse from there:

Last winter the Kent community was rocked by the terrible tragedy of an 18-year-old youth named Sky Walker beating to death his mother, Trudi Steuernagel, a distinguished professor at Kent State University.

Apparently Trudi did things right - loved Sky unconditionally, got the best professional help available, offered extraordinary opportunities for Sky to be in situations he could handle and among people he could function with.

The horror is that Trudi survived for a week after the attack, probably aware that she was suffering and dying at the hands of the child she had tried to do right by. She had protected him from the consequences of his actions for 18 years, unable to control his behavior. Reality intervened.

So, not only are autistics utterly self-absorbed and practically insensate, we are also unpredictably violent, stone-cold killers.

Lovely.

*It's true that "autism" does actually come from the Greek word for self, autos, and that the word was initially coined to describe a pattern of slowly closing oneself off from other people and the external world that the word's creator, the early 20th-century Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, noticed in some of his schizophrenic** patients. But expert understanding of what autism is has changed a whole lot since Bleuler's day --- sometimes even in response to what actual autistic people have told the experts! --- and I don't think the article reflects that.

**Bleuler invented that word, too.

Cassandra and Apollo

ABFH has asked her readers to contribute doggerel to a "Tony Attwood/FAAAS Poetry Slam", which I think is an awesome idea, but I've been fighting writer's block recently, and trying to write poetry (even bad poetry!) after so many years out of practice sounds like too big a challenge.

So, instead, I'll talk about Cassandra and Apollo.

Cassandra, as she appears in the Agamemnon, is a former priestess of Apollo and princess of Troy, captured by Agamemnon in the Trojan War. She has the gift of prophecy, which she demonstrates on arriving at Agamemnon's palace by reciting his family's bloody history.

This amazes the chorus (made up of wise old men of Argos, too old to have accompanied Agamemnon to Troy) so much that they have to ask her how she came by her gift:

Chorus
You come from a far country and recite
Our ancient annals as though you had been present.

Cassandra
The Lord Apollo bestowed this gift on me.

Chorus
Was it because he had fallen in love with you?

Cassandra
I was ashamed to speak of this till now.

Chorus
Did you come, then, to the act of getting child?

Cassandra
At first I consented, and then I cheated him.

Chorus
Already filled with his gift of prophecy?

Cassandra
Yes, I forewarned my people of their destiny.

Chorus
Did your divine lover show no displeasure?

Cassandra
Yes, the price I paid was that no one listened to me.

(Dialogue taken from George Thomson's 1938 translation of the Oresteia, reproduced in Classical Mythology: Images and Insights by Stephen L. Harris and Gloria Platzner).

So, Apollo falls in love with Cassandra, and gives her the ability to see the future as part of his courtship attempt. Cassandra, wanting to keep the prescience but not wanting to shed her priestly virginity, rebuffs him, which makes him angry. He curses her, rendering her gift useless and sterile, and her visions a burden --- while still at Troy, she foresees the Greeks' strategy of entering the city in a wooden horse, and warns her people, but they ignore her; and while she's a captive at Argos, she foresees Clytemnestra's murderous intentions toward her husband, Agamemnon, and toward Cassandra herself, but is similarly unable to convince anyone of the danger. Even those elders in the Chorus, who are quoted above listening to the story of how Cassandra became a prophetess, and marveling at her ability to pull their royal family's sordid history out of thin air, end up dismissing her predictions.

With that in mind, let's turn to the treatment of the myth on which Maxine Aston and FAAAS seem to have based their own mythology of Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder:

CASSANDRA
Apollo fell in love with the mortal Cassandra, but cursed her after some small infringement of his rules. "This attraction of opposites seems to exert a magnetic pull, when - like the God who loved Cassandra - an Apollo man is drawn to a psychic woman who is emotional, irrational, impractical, and often unimpressed with him. He finds her fascinating, frustrating, and unpredictable. Many Apollo men are drawn to such women whom they try and control."

"The woman who rejects the handsome, virtuous, dependable Apollo man usually does so because he lacks qualities that are essential for her, such as depth and intensity, or emotional closeness, or sexual spontaneity ... Apollo men are rejected by women who want a deeper bond, with more intensity and emotional expressiveness, than he can provide.

I really don't see this in the story at all; if anything, it's Apollo who wants more (sexually and emotionally) from Cassandra than she is willing to give!

I also don't see in the Cassandra of legend any of the traits Aston (or her source, Jean Shinoda-Bolen) attributes to her: as a priestess of Apollo, Cassandra would have held many of the same values as her divine suitor --- why else would she have chosen to devote her life to his service?

Still less do I see in Apollo the emotionally distant, hyper-rational being who just can't understand the human need for love and attention. While he is the god of a lot of things associated with intellect and reason --- music, healing and medicine, cities, the sun --- he's also a very demanding, jealous and quick-to-anger sort, like most of the Greek gods.

Examples: He and his sister Artemis killed the fourteen sons and daughters of the Theban queen, Niobe, just because she boasted that in bearing and raising so many children she had outdone Apollo and Artemis's mother; he had Artemis kill a woman, Coronis, whom he had loved and found to be unfaithful; when the satyr Marsyas challenged him to a musical competition and lost, he had Marsyas flayed alive for daring to think himself a better piper.

Apollo is also frequently head over heels in love --- typically with mortal women (and a few men) or nymphs, and often tragically. Besides Cassandra, there's Daphne, who begged her river-god father to turn her into a tree rather than let Apollo touch her; Creusa, a mortal woman who had a son, Ion, by him, whom she abandoned, only to be unable to conceive any other child once she married, and met with skepticism and disgust by her grown son when she finally reunited with him; Hyacinthus, whom Apollo accidentally killed; Rhoio, whose father threw her into the sea when he learned she was pregnant (by guess who); Adonis, the hero also loved by Aphrodite, killed by a wild boar; Cyparissus, who killed himself in Apollo's presence; Clytia, who loved Apollo unrequitedly and was changed into a sunflower; Leucothea, sister of Clytia, whom Apollo visited disguised as her mother, and whose father, learning of the affair from Clytia, ordered her to be buried alive.

Neither of these aspects --- the jealous, angry god who'll kill you for looking at him cross-eyed, or the serially lovesick Romeo whose reckless affairs frequently end in the loved one getting killed --- sounds like the Apollonian man Aston and Bolen describe:

APOLLO
Apollo was the Greek God of detached observation and intellectual elucidation, a personality trait having similarities with the cognitive style of those with alexithymia. In classical myth Apollo is considered the antithesis of Dionysus, the God of emotional expressiveness.

According to Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Jean Shinoda-Bolen, "Individuals who resemble Apollo have difficulties that are related to emotional distance, such as communication problems, and the inability to be intimate ... It is paradoxical that the God of clarity, and the man who can speak so precisely and clearly about an impersonal subject is so sparing of words about feelings and so obscure and difficult to interpret when he does say something about himself ... Rapport with another person is hard for the Apollo man. He prefers to access (or judge) the person from a distance, not knowing that he must "get close up" - be vulnerable and empathic - in order to truly know someone else...

While this is certainly an aspect of Apollo (cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy), it's not the side of him I see guiding his actions in the Cassandra story. That Apollo is demanding, needy, desperately in love and furious at Cassandra for withholding it from him.

He might even have Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder!

Criticism by Armchair Diagnosis

In the past month or so, I've come across two very similar instances of literary criticism in which the critic invokes "autism" to characterize strains of alienation and misanthropy in an author's body of work.

The first such usage I encountered was in a recent article in Raritan by Cambridge professor Andy Martin, titled "Autism, Empathy and Existentialism," which posited that French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus represented opposite extremes of alienation and empathy:

One way of understanding the difference between the two thinkers is to see them as occupying different ends of a spectrum with autism at one end and empathy at the other.
...
Camus manages to find much to identify with in Sartre, a sense of common ground: "Even in the most well-constructed lives, there always arrives a moment in which all the facades collapse. ... This feeling is common to us. ... As a result of going against the tide, a sense of loathing, a feeling of revolt, takes possession of our entire being, and the revolt of the body is what we call nausea." What they have in common is, paradoxically, the same thing that divides them from each other and even from themselves --- a sense of the unbearable lightness of being, pitting the individual against an interpretive community in a standoff that Camus would eventually evoke with the word "absurdity." It is characteristic of Camus that he derives some glimmer of empathy out of what can be understood as an extreme form of "social autism."

... [I]t is characteristic of Sartre that he takes Camus to pieces to see how his text works. In particular, he homes in on the use of the "passé-composé" --- what we tend to call the "perfect" --- tense. ... [T]he fact that the "composed past," consisting of an auxiliary (either être or avoir) plus a past participle can, in effect, be decomposed, seen as a bundle of disconnected pieces, appears to Sartre as the key to understanding the book: the world is just like that --- a miscellaneous collection of things that don't really fit together to make anything meaningful. It is not a plenitude but a series of gaps and voids, which we have tenuously stitched together. Camus, reading Sartre, asks himself: what does Sartre have in mind, and, by extension, what do we all have in mind, "at the limits of conscious thought"? Sartre, on the other hand, asks himself: what tense is he using?

The second instance (though it was written well before the first; I just encountered them in this order) of this literary use of autism-as-metaphor was a paraphrase of Simone de Beauvoir's "Must We Burn Sade?" in Andrea Dworkin's Pornography: Men Possessing Women.

In her essay on the Marquis de Sade, Simone de Beauvoir describes Sade's sexuality as autistic. Her use of the word is figurative, since an autistic child does not require an object of violence outside himself (most autistic children are male). Male power expressed in pornography is autistic as de Beauvoir uses the word in reference to Sade: it is violent and self-obsessed; no perception of another being ever modifies its behavior or persuades it to abandon violence as a form of self-pleasuring.

Both writers, de Beauvoir and Martin (and, to some extent, Dworkin too), are using "autism" and "autistic" to describe a worldview in which everything one encounters is either self or object.

Martin, in particular, is making explicit use of Simon Baron-Cohen's earlier "mindblindness" model of autism (which he has now incorporated into a larger theory involving sex differences in the brain):

Autism, from this point of view, is a form of mindblindness, an inability to form hypotheses about others, or even to acknowledge that there is such a thing as intentionality. Whereas solipsism is a refusal to believe in the existence of others, autism allows that other people exist out there --- I can see them, I can hear them, I can smell them, and so on --- but, at the same time, I cannot recognize them as conscious beings. I can't make sense of them.

(I should point out that, throughout his essay, Martin cannot seem to decide whether Sartre is truly "mindblind," in that he is unwilling or unable to think of other people as entities, with wills, desires and thoughts of their own, or whether he is simply alienated and antagonistic, seeing other minds as inevitably hostile to his own. These are not points of view that can be held simultaneously).

I said earlier that these writers have been using "autism" to describe a worldview. That's true, although Martin and de Beauvoir/Dworkin seem to be talking about different kinds of worldviews --- the former speaks of autism almost like a philosophical school or ideology, while the latter two treat it more like a psychological or character profile. The "autism" de Beauvoir attributes to Sade is, while less precise in what it implies about Sade's beliefs or modes of thought, is just as strong a determinant of his actions as the interpersonal agnosia and alienation Martin ascribes to Sartre.

There are a number of reasons why this use of "autism" annoys me. First, there's the perpetuation of ugly, tired stereotypes about autistics --- that we are unfeeling; that we're incapable of empathy and therefore incapable of kindness, consideration, friendship or love; that we lack understanding; that we are utterly disconnected from everything around us, etc., ad nauseam.

The second reason is that this particular lens doesn't seem to have generated any fresh insights into either Sartre or Sade. Without the oh-so-trendy use of the autism label, what would these articles have said about their subjects? That Sartre liked to take things --- texts, relationships, mental states --- to pieces until nothing recognizable was left of them? That Sade's sexuality was predatory? Neither of those would be much of a newsflash to anyone with a passing familiarity with either man's writing.

Charities: Good. Ads Depicting Said Charities' Main Clients as Monsters or Nonpersons? Bad, Very Bad.

By now, probably a lot of you have seen this:



It's an ad (created by this company) for a U.K.-based children's charity, Action for Children. It shows a tiny human figure (meant to represent the boy narrating, whose name is Dan) trapped inside a rampaging monster wreaking havoc across a vaguely dystopian urban landscape. Near the end of the spot (which is 53 seconds long), a red string wraps itself around the monster and dissolves it, freeing the child inside.* As the monster disappears, the backdrop shifts to a brightly-colored rural landscape, with hills and little birds and everything. The monster tries to get up and swallow Dan again, but Dan crushes it beneath his feet.

The monster is supposed to represent Dan's autism**.

Think about that for a moment. Imagine what it would be like, if you were a child of Dan's age --- preteen to young teen --- and you were told that something about you, some quirk of your personality --- maybe you like Transformers, say, and are always going on about Transformers to your family, friends and classmates --- was absolutely intolerable to other people. That you were so annoying it only made sense that people would snap at you, bully you, or threaten you with violence, and when you acted to defend yourself you were, of course, the violent one. As you are now, you'd probably recognize this as an abusive, victim-blaming crock of shite, right? But think about how you were at a much younger, more vulnerable age, when you might not have known how people are supposed to act, or might not yet have gotten that you, too --- with all your strangeness and awkwardness --- were entitled to fair treatment and freedom from harrassment; you might have found it easy to agree with them. "Gee," you might have said to yourself, "maybe they're right. I don't see people treating anybody else this badly, so maybe there is something about me that's making them do it."

While it's understandable for a confused, frightened autistic youth (or, heck, anybody --- all sorts of people fall for this stuff) to fall into this trap himself, it's an entirely different matter for powerful adults to coach him into accepting this explanation. Adults (and other authority figures --- police, governments, etc.) have a responsibility to protect children (all people, with the strength of the imperative increasing with the decreasing social power of the person in question) from abusers, bullies and manipulators. This is why I'm angry at Action for Children --- because they didn't step in for Dan. They let Dan carry the whole weight of what happened on his own shoulders, believing that his autism puts him in the wrong. That's inexcusable.

You can send angry emails to:

Gary Day, Action For Children - gary.day@actionforchildren.org.uk
The Action For Children Fundraising and Public Relations Department - supporter.care@actionforchildren.org.uk
The Action For Children Media Team - mediateam@actionforchildren.org.uk

Laurence Sassoon, Managing Partner at Baby Creative - laurence@babycreative.com

(The Change.org autism blog has a template up for such letters to Mr. Day, the British Fundraising Standards Board, and Member of Parliament Hilary Armstrong).

I'd also recommend checking out blog posts on this topic by Mike Stanton, Sharon, Bev, Socrates, ABFH, Shiva, Andrea, Ettina and AnneC.

EDIT: According to Shiva, Action for Children has another horrible ad, this one about an adult with multiple sclerosis whose child had been her main caregiver. Shiva goes into great detail about what makes this horrible, so I won't say all that much, other than that it reduces the mother to a dead weight who is only a burden on her daughter.

*Autism is not a personal characteristic in this formulation, but a thing, an alien and malign force, that "has" your child and must be induced to give him up. The parents and/or caregivers are like dragon-slaying knights, while the child is merely the object of the heroic quest.
**Ah, I recognize this. This is the changeling myth! The autistic child is no longer your child, but has become (overnight!) a monstrous stranger. Again, the child is depersonalized and the parents must fight his autism, which means fighting him.

Metaphor at the Expense of Characterization: Autism in Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake"

Full disclosure: I love Margaret Atwood's books. I have ten or eleven of them (of which two are being loaned out to a friend in Tennessee), which may give me a slightly different perspective for this review, as Atwood is the only author I've reviewed so far with whose body of work I am extensively familiar. I'll try to stick to just Oryx and Crake, but I'm not completely ruling out comparisons from elsewhere in the Atwood canon, either.

Like Atwood's other dystopia, Oryx and Crake creates a bizarre near-future society by extrapolating certain trends in contemporary society. While The Handmaid's Tale focused on the backlash against feminism and the growing influence of Dominionist Christianity over US politics, Oryx and Crake explores the catastrophic potential of runaway biotechnology, social fragmentation and class stratification. The world in which her protagonist, Jimmy, and his friend Glenn (who later names himself "Crake") grow up is a starkly divided one in which wealthy technocrats and their families live and work in bubble-like gated communities (called Compounds) run by their employers and everyone else lives in the urban no-man's land Jimmy and Crake know only from rumor ("the pleeblands"). Government seems to have withered away entirely, with corporations running the Compounds as their own miniature fiefdoms.

Against this background, Crake emerges as a star inventor/researcher within his Compound, entrusted with projects of progressively greater importance and secrecy. Always a detached, cynical character, Crake is not shocked when he discovers that the pharmaceutical company that employs him also produces genetically-engineered diseases (to which it then markets the cure). If anything, he is impressed with the elegance of their solution to the problem of avoiding obsolescence. This marks a turning point in the Crake-Jimmy relationship, as it begins to dawn on Jimmy how little he really knows Crake, and as Crake, inspired and emboldened by his discoveries about the extent of his company's research, begins to concoct an apocalyptic plan to kill off most of humanity with an artificial plague and start over with a fast-growing humanoid species designed to his specifications.

About midway through the book, Jimmy visits Crake at the latter's elite technical university. This episode, besides being the one place in the book where Crake is identified as autistic, also serves to place Crake in context. At "Asperger's U," Crake is not unique; he's only the brightest specimen of a type.

Watson-Crick was known to the students there as Asperger's U. because of the high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking, single-track tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude --- these were not your sharp dressers --- and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behavior.
...
"Compared to this place, HelthWyzer [the Compound where Jimmy and Crake grew up; also the name of its parent company] was a pleebland," Crake replied. "It was wall-to-wall NTs."
"NTs?"
"Neurotypicals."
"Meaning?"
"Minus the genius gene."

There are several things worth pointing out about the portrayal of autism and Asperger syndrome in that passage, but first I'd like to look at a similar scenario in another book. In Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark, the protagonist is part of a small group of autistic coders employed in a supportive environment by an IT company in exchange for their unique gift for pattern recognition. With the advances in gene therapy that have taken place in Moon's not-too-distant future, these autistic adults represent the last of their kind. Before their autism could simply be cured, they had been assimilated into society by means of a mixture of workplace accommodations and intensive skills training. In Moon's world, these autistic coders are somewhat embattled within their company: their role is not widely understood, and managers looking to cut costs eye their supportive work environment with suspicion.

By contrast, in Atwood's near-future technocracy, autism is almost a status symbol. The leading university is named for the variant of autism its students all possess, and those students' obsessive singlemindedness and lack of the normal human need for social interaction or R&R makes them immensely valuable to the biotech corporations queuing up to hire them fresh out of college. Just typing that really brings home to me how profoundly unrealistic a scenario it is, not only in terms of the kind of worker employers tend to value, but also in its crude understanding of autism itself. Atwood seems to conceive of us as emotionless automata, uninterested in anything except solving puzzles and designing widgets.

I believe Atwood concocted this version of "autism" to stand as a personification of everything she is trying to criticize about biotechnology, agribusiness and consumer culture. The "tunnel vision" she locates in the unusual wiring of her elite bioengineering students' brains is endemic to our profit-driven society. I also see in her writing here a devoted fan of the liberal arts railing against the ascendancy of the job-training model of university education, with Crake obviously representing the kind of person such an education is meant to produce. (He's one of what C.S. Lewis called the "men without chests" in his The Abolition of Man --- people whose intellects have been educated far beyond their moral development. There is a long literary tradition of bemoaning this type of pedagogical asymmetry).

I think, for those reasons, that Crake is better read as an allegorical figure than a flesh-and-blood character. His portrayal in the story lends itself to that interpretation, too: though we meet Crake as a child, he does not change or mature at all over the course of the story, and his parents seem to have been written into the narrative as an afterthought, and then promptly dispensed with. Crake's role in his relationship with Jimmy is also decidedly one-dimensional: Crake is the critic, always making fun of Jimmy's stupidity and exhorting him to "use [his] neurons," and dismissing or belittling any effort of Jimmy's to argue with him on anything but purely practical terms. Crake's death is also fitting for a character who is little more than a dramatic device: once Crake has loosed his apocalyptic plague upon the world, he promptly commits suicide. He's fulfilled his purpose in the story, now he can go away and stop bothering Margaret Atwood and her editor.

Indeed, as a purely allegorical creation, Crake would not require any flimsy psychiatric diagnosis to explain his inhuman nature. He would already be inhuman, no slandering of large groups of people required.

A postscript: this is a fairly dramatic reassessment of Crake. The first time I read the book, I liked him and identified with him, seeing both myself and my boyfriend in him. (Crake demonstrated my rationality and intellectualism, my boyfriend's misanthropy and our shared tendency to ask a lot of "why" questions about human misery and try to come up with inventive, radical solutions).