What are the advantages of Asperger's/ASD?What are the disadvantages in a NT world?
Are there more disadvantagesthan advantages to having Asperger's/ASD?
What trait helps you in a NT world? What trait hinders you?
I came across these questions being asked on the Asperger’s page on social media. These questions are capable of being answered in almost infinite variety. I shall give the answer that occurred to me today.
I would first of all say that I rend to refer to ASC (Autism Spectrum Condition) rather than ASD. I tend to be sceptical of those ‘d’ words, using them only with sharp qualification. Although I do recognise that the condition involves a disorder and a disability, these things tend to manifest themselves mostly in relations with uncomprehending and uncaring others and an unbending society. And why should people and society change to
accommodate a difficult minority? Because it is the right thing to do in itself, opening up a space which allows for the entry and participation of those at a disadvantage, and because it makes available a whole range of incredible talents for society.
I could answer the question on the advantages anddisadvantages of ASC simply:
Pro:Extreme Intelligence
Con: Everything Else
If the ‘pro’ response is a little presumptuous on my part – we should never trust people by their own self-image - the ‘con’ part isn’t far from the truth.
I can identify the advantages immediately:
A high IQ and EQ, intense focus and concentration, single-mindedness, great attention to detail; I’m a systematizer with great organizational skills, eloquence, creativity, resilience, stubbornness, high energy, straight-forwardness in cutting to the chase.
All of this sounds superb, until I add the crucial rider – this all occurs around things, places, and persons I am interested in, and only with respect to those things. Without that interest inciting the inner motives, I have a low IQ and EQ, become distracted, lack energy, exhibit tendencies to disorganisation, waste time, and give up.
As for which trait helps me most in a NT world, I would say that the fact that my lips can close and remain closed helps me get by the most! People are not always appreciative of my sometimes uncompromising commitment to truth-seeking, still less my sledgehammer wit. 'Truth hurts,' I have been known to in an attempt to rationalise another misadventure in social relations. Which is to say that there is wisdom in knowing that society isn’t a science lab or an academy and that relations to others are, well, social and are based on a certain interplay involving a range of skills and emotions. I learned that lesson the hard way, after puzzling long and hard as to why people would pull away and keep their distance after being on the receiving end of my unusually insightful and helpful observations. It’s a lesson that certain people practising the politics of ‘telling the truth’ have yet to learn. I had one associate in politics insist that ‘truth trumps feelings.’ Does it really? In all contexts? And why the need to draw a sharp antithesis here? There are such things as emotional and social intelligence. I take it as significant that the truth-tellers tend to be among the most politically inept people on the planet. I also note the extent to which those who are most concerned to assert and impose truth tend only to have part of the truth, and often not even that. A half-truth is perhaps the most dangerous of all when it leads people to speak and act as if they had the whole truth, with the result that the truth they do have comes to be over-extended, distorted, and perverted.
These observations are drawn from my semi-detached experiences of politics. I have been a member of various bodies and organisations over the years, without ever building any close political friendships and allegiances. Instead, I sought to offer friendly criticism and advice from within, hoping that my membership and support would lead others to give my views a hearing. I’m afraid that my words have largely gone unheeded, for the reason that truth-tellers in politics proceed on the basis of the presumption they are already in possession of all the knowledge they need and that is for others to listen and submit to education and enlightenment. It could simply be that I am wrong, of course. But no one can be so wrong for so long, surelY? I put up with this for far too long, succumbing to errors of groupthink along the way. Along with my own particular contributions – the bits which were ignored – I employed all the language associated with certain political movements, ‘x years to save the planet,’ the ‘window of opportunity is closing,’ ‘tipping points,’ and the predictions that the world will become a ‘hellhole,’ and all such non-scientific hyperbole born of campaign imperatives. I hear the same language being employed now by a new generation of activists and simply advise them to check and corroborate the claims they make. Campaigners take outliers in the science, the most extreme cases and predictions in the worst case scenarios and present them as the most likely. This is a clear case of political and psychological manipulation which not only undermines the cause of connecting the realms of science and practical reason, but is a rank bad, cynical, and manipulative politics. And emotionally unintelligent.
I’m not clubbable, I don’t take people by their self-image, I remain critical and independent in face of peer pressure, and I am more than prepared to go it alone if need be. This trait of ASC may put me at a social disadvantage, leaving me without connections and ties to others, but it also places me at a political advantage. Trusting my critical instincts keeps me free of the errors of groupthink. It’s not much of an advantage in a political
and social world that seems to be an organised, systematic groupthink. But the worst errors I have made in the past quarter of a century have all come through a sense of misplaced loyalty to others and to a cause. When you are alone and isolated, seeking meaning and belonging in a large and confusing world, you can make a commitment to a cause and find a community in an instance. It is a tempting illusion. To my credit, I retained my critical and independent spirit throughout my participation in environmental politics. But as the years passed I became increasingly tetchy at the lack of reciprocity and comradely feelings from others. Of course! People in politics are loyal to a cause and to an ideology first and foremost, and to people only to the extent that they share that political commitment. My critical comments, offered as friendly advice, were taken as evidence of deviance and disloyalty. It was tolerated for so long as I offered support. Once I ceased to support in order to have people focus on the critical observations I made and advice I offered, I was unfriended, ignored, even blocked.
The lesson is to never ever compromise your own inner 'yes' and 'no' for fear of losing the 'friendship' of remote others, not least when the basis of connectionis politics, ideology, or material interest. Such people tend to be friendly to particular forms of money and power, a community that is really a cause, and not to you.
I haven’t withdrawn my past writings onenvironmental issues for a number of reasons. There is a climate crisis, and these writings are evidence of my activities over a period of time to alert the world to the need to take action. I stand by this. And I stand by the particular forms of action I identified as necessary to effective action. I always integrated sound advice on politics and ethics within the campaigning, conscious-raising literature I issued, and I stand by these words. The parts of past work that I now repudiate principally concern the campaigning rhetoric, the ‘x years to save the planet’ and the predictions of the hell to come. I am now explicit in condemning this as bad science and bad politics – in fact, it is neither science nor politics nor the bridge that is required to bring the two realms in relation to compass the one reality, it is the mess that people who know nothing of politics create when they seek to ‘tell the truth’ to governments and citizens. Let such people direct and determine policy and the result will be a disaster that sets the cause of environmentalism back years. I offered friendly advice to this end for decades and was ignored. I now state the position bluntly, and environmental friends can lump it.
As someone comments: “Honestly, lacking empathy helps me not get overly attached to people.”
I would suggest that whilst that may protect you against misplaced loyalties with respect to political and ideological causes, it can leave you somewhat isolated socially. If there are dangers of loyalties to symbols in abstraction from reality, and of loyalties to people on the basis of a shared commitment to a cause, then a lack of empathy can lead you to a very lonely place.
I’m a historian by training, moving later onto philosophy. Whilst I struggled at school, I found that fact, logic, and language came very easily to me. I would consider my heightened abilities in these areas to be in some way related to my ASC. It’s an advantage when it comes to critical thought and independent action. I don’t make a virtue of going it alone and ‘being alone.’ Life on the margins is hard and lonely. But the bad faith that comes with a knowing complicity and compromise in half-truths as lies involves a profound discomfort and dis-at-ease. This makes political loyalty and social engagement extremely difficult for me. I can manage it in face-to-face relations, looking beyond ideological viewpoints to the affective bonds and ties between people, silencing and suppressing my critical views, or offering them as mild alternate views which could serve as corrections, if people could be inclined to take the ‘hint.’ The evidence, I’m afraid, is that the people most in need of correction tend to be the ones least capable of a self-correction incited by the friendly persuasion of others. As a result, I move from ‘hints’ to explicit criticism and advice, and promptly get unfriended.
I would still count this as an advantage rather than a disadvantage, though. There are few disabilities worse than the mental and moral weakness that induces a person to suppress doubt and silence conscience to join an erring multitude out of a misplaced loyalty.
But to answer the question of ASC advantages directly, I would say that possess a single-minded focus and determination, a capacity for intense focus and concentration, and a talent for a rather other-worldly immersion in my ‘special interests.’ When those ‘special interests’ are issues arising in politics, ethics, and philosophy, then my work can be deemed praiseworthy within the NT world. When those interests concern my passions in pop music, football and objets d’art (‘collectables’ and curios), normally adjusted folk in the normalworld smile sympathetically before moving rapidly on. I say this to make the point that there is no necessary genius to ASC. I see neurotypical folk romanticize and fetishize AS, as when green friends all praised Greta Thunberg’s special insight on account of her Asperger’s. I pointed out to them that they liked her because she was telling them something they already knew, espousing a cause with which they already agreed. Such people found me rude and uncouth and thoroughly objectionable. I wondered how many in this engagement were aware of the bitter irony it involved. As someone with ASC, I found myself accused of 'bullying' a poor girl on account her having Asperger's. In an age of identity politics, the only identity I was allowed in this 'debate' was one of maleness, an irredeemable state for which public contrition is demanded nonetheless. I, as someone with ASC, was subject to the vehement criticism of neurotypical people who were romanticising and fetishising Thunberg's Asperger's on account of agreeing with her environmental views. To which, all I can say is that I am very glad to be unclubbable and out of the clutches of such dull, predictable conformity.
The only insight here is that born of the capacity to focus with an obsessive, relentless drive upon a particular issue. That doesn’t necessarily make that issue important and it doesn’t necessarily make any conclusions that are drawn right and true. The normal methods of observation and investigation apply. But, yes, like many with AS, I can maintain focus and concentration well beyond what is considered normal, maybe yielding important insights on what may be important issues of general concern. But it ain’t necessarily so, and it is not an essential
requirement when it comes to valuing people. And I am very glad to have spent a long spell in the academy learning proper academic standards with respect to knowledge, understandind, and methodology.
This brings me to another point I would like to make with respect to fact and logic. I read many with AS sing their own praises in terms of their rationality. It is most unwise to take people’s self-image as reality. That claim to rationality that people can make is something that needs to be tested by common standards of evaluation, not assumed. More often than not I see the claim made in terms of the superiority of science over religion. This is naïve in the extreme. I don’t like to check these points on any AS forum, for the reason that the people who congregate there tend to be searching for reassurance and connection in an often lonely world. But very many are guilty of mixing their logics in the crudest of ways, just to make the point that they are rational and logical beings, in contradistinction to 'superstitious' and 'ignorant' people in the ‘normal’ world.
I dislike this tendency to divide people up, with some above and others below in some rational hierarchy. It is both unnecessary and unwarranted. The claims to rationality are far from always being true. Further, there are things such as social and emotional intelligence which are not ‘trumped’ by fact, scientific knowledge,and reason. A disadvantage of ASC, I would suggest, is that it can lead you to scotomize other ways of knowing and being than obvious physical truths. As an historian and philosopher by academic training, I am stepped in the worlds of fact and logic. And the more I studied, the more I became aware that there is far more to reality and to living than evidence and proof; these things are the easy bits.
I once worked in an office in Liverpool. I was given one of those Belbin’s team roles tests in order to work out what the company, in its despair, could do with me in order to make me useful to their ends in some way. I emerged as a Plant, the ideas person, the game changer noted for being unorthodox, innovative, imaginative, individualist. They made me project manager …. I stormed out in a rage within a week. What is the point of finding things out if no-one acts in accordance with them?
Someone comments: “Honestly, lacking empathy helps me not get overly attached to people.”
I would suggest that whilst that may protect you against misplaced loyalties with respect to political and ideological causes, it can leave you somewhat isolated socially. If there are dangers of loyalties to symbols in abstraction from reality, and of loyalties to people on the basis of a shared commitment to a cause, then a lack of empathy can lead you to a very lonely place.
I would just recommend that people be cautiousand critical. Evolutionary biology reveals human beings to be rationalising beings rather than rational beings. The idea of human beings as truth-seekers is a theological notion dependent upon a creator God who made the world intelligible to intelligent beings with the innate potential for reason and the motive to use it externally. The content of that idea has been lost with the “death of God.” In the absence of God there is only the evolutionary biology and psychology which reveals human beings to be social beings wired to form tribes. These tribes proceed to identify ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups, making common cause with those who are the same and ostracizing those that are different. Add the fact that humans are also wired for culture, and we have a recipe for the domination of an erring, pernicious, divisive, and destructive groupthink. And the irony is that it is often the people who consider themselves to be the most critical
and most knowledgeable who are the most guilty of the crassest of errors, for the simple reason they have made commitments on the basis of shared identities and ideologies.
It takes someone who possesses something of a “lone wolf” character to be the critical thinker who is willing to deviate from dominant norms and hengo against the tribe.
