Wednesday – what the world owes to autism Wednesday was World Autism Awareness Day. I promised you this, so here it is. Autism is a pretty lonely and frightening condition. One of the key traits of autism is an inability to automatically-understand other people’s feelings and behaviour. High-ability people with mild traits of autism, therefore, spend their life trying to rationalise people’s behaviour, trying to learn the ‘rules’ of life, watching people’s faces and body language – terrified lest they say something which offends or damages, continually being taken by surprise at people’s reactions. Low-ability people with autism, and people with severe autism, live in a world which is at all times utterly incomprehensible, where people behave apparently randomly, yet continually tell them not to do what it seems good for them to do. It is, of course, essential that we recognise autism as a Special Need, and that we make provision to help people with autism – to give them a happy and fulfilled life. But I would wish that people might regard autism, not just as a charity case, but as – what it is – also a blessing and a benefit for society. I believe that there is a strong case to celebrate what autistic people have done for the world. Here is the rub. If the autism gene is so damaging, so negative, why has it not died out – why was it not discarded, along with gills and tails, way back in our evolutionary development? The reason is, of course, that the autism gene is very beneficial to society ... to the extent that, I would argue, humankind would not have advanced without it. Autism, for example, is closely linked to engineering. If you look at the families of people with autism, there is always at least one engineer in there somewhere, and often droves of them! It is possible to look at autism as merely one extreme of an engineering-skills spectrum, with can’t-change-a-light-bulb at the other. No autism, no engineers. I am not totally happy with this last point, since it still sees autism as a negative – as the ‘cost’ of engineering. So I would add that the issue is more complicated than that. This is because autism, as you will appreciate, includes traits other than and beyond a link to ‘engineering’. People with autism naturally block out the rest of the world. They are often obsessive. And where these natural characteristics are put, say, to research, they are positive boons. In the past, they used to be stereotyped as traits of the ‘the mad scientist’, spending hours alone in a garret inventing something, or repeating experiments over and over again to confirm a hypothesis. I am convinced that most of the world’s greatest scientists *must* have had a streak of autism in them, somewhere. And going back to the very beginning, who was it in prehistoric times found out that, if you rub two sticks together for ages and ages you can make fire, or who observed the heavens for long enough to realise that there was a pattern there, and to analyse that pattern into ‘months’ and ‘years’ – if not people with a streak of autism? It certainly wasn’t the stone age people who simply wanted to party. Looked at from this perspective, it is the people with the ‘socialite’ gene, not the people with autism, who have been useless to the process of technological and scientific development. Autism is often co-morbid with other special needs, and those we must address. In its most extreme form, autism is a catastrophically debilitating condition. But in many cases, an ‘autistic streak’ is something which we can celebrate. People with autism look at the world in an utterly different way, in a way which people without the gene cannot comprehend (any more that people with autism can comprehend them). It *has* to be in humankind’s interests to acknowledge and include that different view-of-life. And children with autism need teaching that they have something different, special and vitally important to offer the world – particularly since, just as it can be co-morbid with special needs, the autism gene can also be co-morbid with traits of artistic genius, mathematical ability etc. People with autism also often rationalise moral issues logically as black or white, without the blurring many people seem to achieve so effortlessly (and so hypocritically), and consequently they are often people of immense moral stature … and, yes, inflexibility. There is an argument, that many of those people whom you would acknowledge as ‘the conscience’ of society were responding to an inclination implanted in them by the autism gene. There are billions of people out there with autism in its mildest aspects. It is not a disease, it is a spectrum. Without autism, we would not be where we are as a species. And whilst we determine to care for the negative aspects of the condition, let’s also remember to celebrate its advantages, and the contribution it makes to our society.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 10:38:33 +0000