Great Dreams of Heaven.
For many years, people I have encountered in life have thought me an eccentric, a 'genius' of some indeterminate description. ‘You have the knack of reaching all the right ends by using all the wrong means’ my best friend told me in 1984. Getting it right by doing it wrong is not my second nature but my first. If I do get it right. Unfortunately, life becomes more and more complicated after school and university, and roundabout ways to right ends can become exhausting over time. It becomes less and less possible to realize your goals this way. You can avoid and evade, and keep reality at bay this way. But you will struggle to realise the things you need to realise in order to function successfully in society. After a lifetime of struggle, with a series of lows punctuated by high achievement, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Condition. It turns out that I am not a genius after all, I am something much more interesting: I am autistic. I am eccentric, though. And still a genius, in the sense that everyone has their own particular 'genius.'
My 'Irreducibly Polynomial' 'autistobiolog' contains a number of personal sketches and observations drawn from a lifetime of struggle and suffering grace of an undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Condition. Even with diagnosis in September 2021, the struggle continues. I had thought that diagnosis would be the gateway to a new life, with the emergence of a new self, the real self emerging from behind the mask of the old identity. It's not happened yet. It’s a tough world when you are forced to live by the beat of your own drum. But better than trying endlessly to live to the alien beat of uncomprehending and uncaring others. People are under pressure in their own struggles to surve, and don't have the time, resources, and energy to spare for those in need. I continue to affirm the musical model which contains hopes for attunement, establishing good relations with others, with the world, and with yourself and your essential needs. We are all of us, autistic and neurotypical alike, in need of the help and support of others. As social beings, human beings need others in order to be themselves.
Which brings me to happiness. I have known tragedy in my life but continue to believe in comedy in the true sense of the word, holding out the possibility of a happy ending. We know from experience that many who pursue happiness by various means, strategies, and goods can miss the target by a very wide mark. Happiness is not about consciously striving towards certain ends nor about the possession and accumulation of certain goods. Goals prove elusive as goods turn and possess the possessor. Happiness is the constant, creative unfolding of one’s healthy potentials via a loving and productive engagement with the world, with others, and with one's particular genius. I like the original meaning of genius, which pertains to the spirit or inner power that is unique to each and every person. Love, a reason to love, a reason to live, and a sense of purpose, meaning, and belonging all play a far greater role than stratagems and goals.
As a philosopher I know fine well the elusiveness of happiness when it comes to precise definition. Philosophers have written entire books on the subject, full of such convoluted prose and studded with so many clauses and qualifications as to leave you none the wiser. The self-help books which flood the market are even worse. But if you are in need of a self-help guru, then Aristotle’s the man to turn to. Aristotle makes it clear that happiness is not merely an end but a process reaching towards an end. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle set out to discover ‘the supreme good for man.’ He sought to identify the best way for us to lead our lives and to give them meaning. For Aristotle, a thing is best understood by looking at its purpose, goal, or end. This line of enquiry makes it clear that some goals are subordinate to other goals, which in turn are subordinate to yet other goals and so on until you reach the goal that is an end-in-itself. This is the Supreme Good, says Aristotle, which is Happiness:
"And of this nature Happiness is mostly thought to be, for this we choose always for its own sake, and never with a view to anything further: whereas honour, pleasure, intellect, in fact every excellence we choose for their own sakes, it is true, but we choose them also with a view to happiness, conceiving that through their instrumentality we shall be happy: but no man chooses happiness with a view to them, nor in fact with a view to any other thing whatsoever."
This makes it possible to identify the nature of happiness. In coming to identify the distinctive function of a thing we are able to grasp its essence, the distinctive qualities of a thing. Human beings have sentience like animals and need nourishment like plants, Aristotle argues, but their distinctive function is their unique capacity to reason. Happiness as the Supreme Good entails leading a life that enables us to use and to develop our distinctive reason, in accordance with rational principles. Happiness is not an end state but an ongoing activity. It is for this reason that I tend to refer to philosophizing as an active process rather than simply to philosophy, and to thinking rather than merely assimilating and repeating an established body of thought. Immersion in an accepted and received body of thought is the stiff-necked adversary of thinking and philosophising as an active process of truth-seeking.
Aristotle is aware that good and bad luck plays a part in determining whether we are happy or not. Material circumstances, our place in society, even our looks all have a bearing on how successful we are when it comes to living well. None of this is fair or just. Contingency can be an affront to reason and ethics. But this is not the end of the matter. At the same time, Aristotle insists that we can attain happiness should we determine to live our lives to the full by way of engaging in practices, forming the right habits, and exercising the virtues. Happiness is therefore a matter of behaviour and of habit — of learning, acquiring, and exercising the virtues as qualities for successful living. ‘Success’ here means something much richer and deeper than ticking off objectives listed on a task-sheet, attaining goals on a target sheet, or obtaining goods on a shopping list. To be successful in Aristotle’s sense is to flourish well. Happiness is all about the good life defined in terms of living well. A person who cultivates the qualities for flourishing by way of behaviours, practices, and habits is able to bear the trials and tribulations of life with equanimity, and is thus preserved from unhappiness.
The philosophical definition of happiness that I am most prepared to take a punt on follows along these Aristotelian lines, referring to the healthy innate potentials we all possess and their creative unfolding and realisation in tandem with one another in a social context. Human beings are social beings; we need each other to be ourselves. This observation, however, highlights the difficulties that autistic people face, given impairments and deficits in social communication, interaction, and imagination. For reasons given above, I argue for the eudaimonistic or developmental model over the impairment model of autism but - and it is a big but - am aware of the dangers of a toxic positivity. Autistic people face huge difficulties when it comes to realising and exercising their healthy potentialities in social life, difficulties which can indeed be described as disabilities, and with which they will need the assistance and support of others. When it comes to happiness, I know not only the elusiveness of its definition as a philosophy, I know the difficulty of its real life attainment as an autist. The theory is one thing, the practice is another. Aristotle’s view that human beings are social beings is a deceptively simple truth. Discussing the likelihood of my autism with a family member, I was told that there are roundabout ways of doing most things, with descriptions being offered of how certain ends can be obtained when people accommodate those with ‘special needs.’ So, I was told, autism is not really a disability. That’s fine, I said, slowly, and with a sceptical tone ... before stating that the problem autistic people face is that they are often isolated and lack a wealth of connections with the others they need to attain their ends. ASC can be a social death sentence; those accommodating others that help you attain your ends are not always available and, truth be told, rarely are. Life with ASC is often lived alone.
‘The truth will set you free,’ said Jesus Christ. (John 8:32). But, I ask, will it set others free? I have had experience of people who will listen attentively to my description of autism, express sympathy, and declare themselves to be accommodating, only to revert immediately their ‘normal’ behaviour. I don’t remotely blame them here. Social behaviours and patterns are set through an everyday interaction that most people adjust themselves to and build their expectations around. It is remarkably difficult to accommodate those exceptional people who do things differently. The potential for being at cross-purposes is huge when it comes to one-off or intermittent encounters with well-adjusted others. The best hope for autistic people lies with those reiterated encounters within close, proximal relations to familiar others, enabling familiarity through repeated contact. People need to get to know and accept, and even enjoy and be amused by, your little foibles and peculiarities.
Whether we refer to philosophy or ‘real life,’ an autistic person is always kept company by the disquieting thought that happiness in any of its definitions will always be just out of reach. Like the ever elusive butterfly.
I have excelled and been recognised as a high-achiever in a considerable few of the various things I have done over the years. This was particularly the case with respect to university, but also the various training courses I undertook at college. For a long time I identified this recognition and certification with happiness. I would now identify all that activity and attainment as surrogacy, a substitute for living well. I effectively lost myself in a certain kind of success. Thwarted in social areas, I took to expressing my talents and pouring out my energies in academic or technical work (computers) at some remove from the ‘real world’ and 'real people.' I address the world through my writing voice. Until late 2015, there were no photographs of me to show the outside world. Unless you were among the handful of people who would see me in the neighbourhood, you wouldn’t have seen me at all. The only place you could have seen or heard me was in my written work. I have written over twenty million words in the past quarter of a century. A lot of the work has been critically acclaimed, deemed ‘significant’ and ‘meticulous.’ One prominent academic - John Bellamy Foster - declared himself 'stunned' when he read a mere fraction of my work. Another - Arran Gare - said that my work had saved him the trouble of having to do it. I'm not given to false modesty. There are many things I struggle badly with. Even the simplest of tasks can be beyond me. I am unable to ride a bike, let alone drive a car. And I am notorious for missing cues in conversation. I'm proud of my written work. It received the recognition of academics and scholars long before I received a diagnosis of autism. It's substantial work. I maintained the rank of Top 0.1% on Academia for over a decade, seeing it drop to 0.5% only recently, as I withdrew my texts from free access.
At the same time, this written work has been produced from within a surrogate world. Through all those years of writing, a little voice has kept nagging away within, asking me if all this work is truly making me happy. I get a buzz at recognition and praise, but the buzz fades and the feeling of emptiness and futility returns. And I understand clearly what that nagging voice is trying to tell me: that I, too, am worthy of being happy, that I, too, can come to know happiness. Happiness in the sense of flourishing well is the birth-right of each and all, the Supreme Good, and autistic people are no less worthy on account of their being ‘different.’
My advice to people with ASC is to be wary of deflection and deviation, withdrawing from things that seem so difficult as to be well-nigh impossible to become resigned to living only in surrogate worlds with the most austere dreams of Heaven. I have read numerous accounts written by autistic people in the past two or three years. One of the most striking thing about these accounts is how many autistic people, when asked to envisage their Heaven, ask only for the absence of anxiety. This negative ideal takes the place of a more positive conception of the happy habitus. To autistic people I say: happiness is as much your right and destiny as it is everyone else’s. You are different but no different. And, like everyone else, you have a right to be happy. Whether you deserve to be happy will depend on the extent to which you come to terms with happiness as a process as well as an end. This is a matter of behaviours, practices, and acquiring the right habits. These are the things for you to do. I would just say that as you set about the task of acquisition, avoid the low expectations of others and don’t be fooled by their ‘expertise’ – they know only their own lives, they don’t know who you are. And resist the temptation to set your standards low: compromise, resignation, and acceptance in search of contentment are not the same things as happiness. And they don’t bring contentment, either, they merely incite the nagging voice to remind you all the more that you too deserve to be happy. The biggest mistakes in my life have come as a result of suppressing my inner voice in order to listen to the 'expert' voice of others. Those others, I have found, are expert by way of nothing other than knowing how to fit themselves to a society that plays the percentages. Their advice may well work for most people. Autistic people are not 'most people.'
Looking at the definitions of happiness offered by autistic people, I am struck by how little people ask of life and of others - a mere absence of anxiety is often enough for many - and how little hope and expectation they have that even their most modest of dreams will be realised. This is a tragedy. People are setting their standards low and are resigned to failure. Such people reconcile themselves to lives of silent sorrow, knowing that their voices will be unheard, their cries for help unanswered.
As someone who is autistic, I well understand where these limited desires come from. An autistic person experiences the world as a mass of formless chaos and ‘noise’ of all kinds; an autistic person lacks internal editors, filters, and brakes. This means that the world as a whole is immediately present, leaving you to try as best you can to select, process, and order information as you receive it in one undifferentiated mass. It is like entering a building, switching a light on, and finding every light in every room coming on, seeing every single room at once. As you work out where you ought to be, people awaiting your response will think you slow and stupid. The truth is that you are processing ten, twenty, or more times the information than they are. You are smart and quick, just trying to compass and transcend the whole. Like God. Subject to constant sensory mixing and overload, you will tend to see the end of constant ‘noise’ as heavenly. Autistic people will thus tend to offer negative definitions of happiness rather than positive ones, emphasising the absence of bad forces rather than the presence, exercise, and enjoyment of good ones. They will therefore emphasis stress reduction or removal, the absence of the ever-present, debilitating anxiety, the reduction of uncertainty and chaos.
"People are happy when they are in control." (Bryce R Howe)
For years I wrote of the necessity of 'social control' and 'rational control,' the control of reason making us free. I now tend to identify the goal of 'control' as a neurotic one, emphasising instead open networks and relations to others, each and all deeply immersed in a sea of being. Control is an attempt to eliminate contingency - luck, fortune, chance - and implies an attempt to manipulate relations to the world and others to make them conform to certain demands and ensure a bedrock certainty. That is, indeed, how an autistic person orders his or her own world, even attempting to order any persons who are in that world. I have certainly done this, and insist on routine, repetition, and regularity. It is a survival mechanism in a life in which the simplest of tasks can seem Herculean. But to survive is not necessarily to thrive. Gregory H Gorski argues for ‘contentment’ and ‘a low stress environment.’ I would love such things too. But contentment in this sense is, like control, a negative ideal, the antithesis of true happiness as flourishing. Control and contentment are also elusive goals, forever out of reach, like the complex, ever-changing, ever-uncertain world around us. There is, in truth, a much better chance of attaining positive goals than there is of achieving these negative goals. Once you start to retreat in life, you never stop falling backwards. Any football fan will understand the point being made here. As soon as a team that finds itself under pressure starts to fall backwards, seeking safety in a massed defence, it loses the capacity to go forwards, thereby inviting even greater pressure. That pressure is never relieved but simply grows until a team is unable to get out of its defensive posture. It is then only a matter of time before, exhausted and overrun, it concedes a goal and loses the game. We need to push beyond our survival and coping mechanisms and instead embrace happiness as flourishing. The task is to identify the conditions of that flourishing.
The stress- and anxiety-free definition of happiness on the part of autistic people is understandable, but is a hopeless retreat from the world. Others express happiness in light of diagnosis in terms of relief and release, yielding a self-knowledge that at last makes actual being a realistic possibility. Diagnosis can be a gateway to a new life. My 'Irreducibly Polynomial' site has Picasso’s Don Quixote as its logo at the top of the page. That figure of the knight errant righting wrongs appeals, with diagnosis taking the form of a knight in shining armour to vanquish all past mistakes and misunderstandings, making it clear who you are as against who you are not. But I love the Quixotic nature of knight errantry. Because diagnosis doesn’t put an end to your struggle or destroy your dragons, it merely moves you on to the next stage, where you can act with greater self-knowledge, whilst still being confronted by uncomprehending others in an uncertain and indifferent world. Your drama means nothing to the outside world. Always, you are subject to forces which encourage you to give up, retreat, resign yourself to your fate. The figure of Don Quixote encourages us to carry on.
I write these words in an attempt to have those who are adjusted to the world understand some small part of the difficulty the ill-adjusted have. I don’t demand that people understand and I don’t demand changes in the behaviour of the well-adjusted. The deepest qualities of human relation, such as love, care, and attention, cannot be commanded. ‘Normal’ people in the ‘normal’ world are themselves stressed to breaking point, doing about all they can to just about survive. Resources are scarce. There is only so much that people called upon to help can do. People with high-needs are high-maintenance. They can burn others out as quickly as they burn themselves out. My words are an attempt to give some understanding as to what it is like living in a world populated by people who are very different from you, people who ‘get it’ easily and naturally when you don’t. It is like being left-handed in a world that has been designed by right-handed people for right-handed people. And that is putting it very mildly. This is my point about advice and expectations. ‘Normal’ is what most people do. The advice of 'normal' people will not work for you. I smile silently whenever I hear so many people declare they are 'not normal,' making a public virtue of their idiosyncratic nature. Such people tend to think much the same way as most other people do, do the same things as others do, watch the same TV shows, have the same 'bucket lists,' have jobs, families, cars, houses, holidays etc. Like all individualists, they tend to look the same to me. I’m not knocking it. Life would have been so much happier for me had I been ‘not normal’ in the same way these people are ‘not normal.’
Since the 'right-handed people' are the majority, they assume that the only way you can be happy is to do as they do, think as they think, and be as they are. And if we could do that, we wouldn’t be AS! There is no cure for autism, only a growing into being through self-knowledge and acceptance.
I once gave someone with an autistic son some advice. Be cautious of advice, because others who think they know best tend to know nothing other than their own experience. Such people presume that what works for them will work for others too. And since they are the majority in ‘normal’ society, and since you are on the margins, they will presume that they are right and that you are wrong. I finished by urging 'have the confidence to trust your own instincts and judgement, because you are much smarter than you may know.'
Is that what you do, she asked.
She had intuited, correctly, that the people who give such advice out so boldly tend not to take it themselves. For the reasons that you are often alone, in dire need of help from others, facing a mass of people who seem to have life sussed, or are at least in the game. It takes an awful lot of nerve to hold your nerve in these circumstances:
"Nobody can say you can’t do it. You will compete with the rest of them, albeit with some modifications because there are some things you know you will never be able to do as well as the rest of them. But you will stay in the game. You are determined to make something of your life, to find some value in it, to keep trying, to keep getting back up and trying different things, no one can say you can’t participate, no one can say you’re too disabled to do anything, you will show them, but in the back of your mind, at night, during the day, sometimes during every free moment of a bad day, you wonder if they are right. You wonder if perhaps after all you can’t do it, you can’t do the things you dreamed of, you can’t participate in the world, maybe it’s just too hard, what if they’re right, what if your thoughts are right, what if, what if. What if it gets worse." (Kate Goldfield, GRASP Advisory Board member).
It is indeed difficult not to abandon hope and lower one’s standards and expectations. ‘Life is hard and then you die,’ as the 'It's Immaterial' album title declares. And if that applies to all people, imagine how much harder it is for autistic people. At some point, it is hard not to abandon the inner belief that you, too, could be happy. As the great line in the movie Clockwise puts it, ‘it’s not the despair, the despair I can stand, it’s the hope …’ My favourite writer is Dante Alighieri. He shows how despair is the easy way out. It is easier to despair than it is to hope. It takes courage to hope for better in the teeth of the circumstances and events that are constantly ranged against you. But despair yields you nothing. There is no peace that way, only depression and self-immolation through the silencing of your inner voice that persists in speaking of other possibilities. Dante’s Inferno is full of those who abandoned hope and foreclosed on life’s possibilities prematurely. Always, there is hope for reconnection and redemption. You, too, deserve to be happy, and may one day achieve happiness, so long as you close your ears to those siren voices persuading you to submit to the misperceptions of others in order to fit in.
"Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that that it shall never have a beginning."
Cardinal John Henry Newman
Living in light of diagnosis has been a steep learning curve for me. I once argued for “Autism Awareness.” I quickly learned that awareness is not enough. Raising others’ awareness of autism is not the same as increasing and deepening their understanding. I have spent considerable time and energy since my referral and diagnosis attempting to give others some idea of what autism entails as a different way of thinking, acting, and being. It’s not necessarily better, nor worse, just a different way of processing information. People smile and nod as I explain, but don’t see that they are merely feigning understanding when simply expressing sympathy. I don't spurn that sympathy. It's a good start. But the fact that they exhibit next to no change in behaviour as a result indicates that they have understood nothing. Learning entails a change in behaviour. Autism awareness is one thing, autism acceptance another thing further down the line: it is the next step. These days it is autism acceptance that we need. Awareness merely means knowing and acknowledging that something exists, it doesn’t necessarily imply a modification of behaviour on their part in light of that recognition. Autism Acceptance is precisely what is needed to make the transition from knowing that autism exists and sympathising to understanding what autism in and changing one’s behaviour. People with autism require understanding, not sympathy, a genuine and deep appreciation on the part of others of their struggles, their unique qualities, and their intrinsic value.
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