(5) The book suggests that autism is natural. Are you serious?
There is a mystery that during my lifetime, and probably during all of
recorded history, no one has ever solved (someone may have
explained it and the record is lost) – why this species we call Homo
Sapiens, supposedly the most successful large social mammal on
Earth (seven billion of us now), contains within it people who want to
be alone.
In the spring of 1998, finally admitting to myself how profoundly
solitary I am by nature, I set out to explore that problem.
By chance, or maybe through luck (not the same thing), I read at that
time An Anthropologist on Mars, a book by the neurologist Oliver
Sacks, and discovered that the instinct to be alone is the central
characteristic of the condition (I refuse to call it a disease or a disorder)
known as autism.
Autism was identified in the 1940s, more or less simultaneously, by the
American psychologist Leo Kanner and an Austrian doctor, Hans
Asperger. Since then it has been studied exhaustively, yet today the
cause of it remains unknown.
That isn't to say it's something new. The autistic personality is as old
as recorded history, probably as old as humanity itself.
Before I go any further, let me make it clear that I possess no official
expertise for this debate. I've had no formal education in psychology,
so, according to some, I have no right to talk about it.
Therefore you should beware of anything I say.
I'm interested in autism because I consider myself to be autistic.
Simple as that. But here again you should note that modern
psychology, as I understand it, doesn't allow the possibility that
someone untrained in psychology can know themselves well enough
to diagnose their own condition. Being the sole inhabitant of your own
body and mind seems to give you no say in the matter at all.
But if you had seen me in the first years of school - crouched against
the wall during recess trying to be as inconspicuous as possible - or,
when I'd found a way past the teacher guards, walking around the
block to be alone and away from the pandemonium of the schoolyard
- or wandering through the fields next to the school (watched
anxiously by teachers who couldn't stop me since the fields were on
school property), where I was comforted by the tall grass and late
summer flowers, things that felt immeasurably closer to me than my
noisy hyper-aggressive peers – no, if you could have seen me then,
you wouldn't have found the possibility of autism in me remote.
What is autism? The answer isn't easy. In fact, you can say that an
answer isn't possible, since the cause is unknown. There may be
several causes, and I accept that they may not all be 'natural'.
In a nutshell, you can say that autistic people are people who lack the
ability to acquire fully normal language and social skills, who have
heightened senses (in particular vision and hearing), and, most
important of all, have a profound desire to be alone.
But let's clear something else up. Autistic people are not by nature
unintelligent. It occurs at all IQ levels. A strong memory is very
common. In fact, Kanner wondered if superior intelligence might be an
inherent characteristic. Autistic people with normal or above normal
IQs are called 'high functioning autistics', or sometimes diagnosed
with AS or Asperperger's Syndrome.
At the same time, I don't want to diminish how disabling the condition
can be. Those who are strongly autistic, at least those who cannot
manage verbal conversation, are unable to function significantly in
social settings. They suffer badly, but that doesn't necessarily mean
they are sick.
Yes, I believe most autistic people are perfectly natural people living in
a very unnatural world, but that is opening the subject of the far distant
past, where neither I nor anyone else has ever been.
To answer the question of what autism is, we would have to get in a
time machine and go back at least 100,000 years. If we could do that
and see for ourselves when the human animal began to talk, when it
began to collect in larger social groups, and if we could examine the
progressive changes in human DNA during that time, then we might
discover the origin of autism, not to mention many other genetic
differences that scientists and doctors insist on calling diseases.
Researchers in the sciences of paleontology and genetics have only
begun to scratch the surface of human origins. They're discovering a
lot of new evidence, and making a lot of new pronouncements, but
most of the latter seem premature to me. The current research into
DNA especially reminds me of the early European explorers cruising
along the coastlines of North America, speculating whether they had
found India.
But I don't pretend to know more than they do. In fact, my ideas are
rooted in their discoveries. Fascinated by all the sciences since I was a
boy, I've paid particular attention to the science of human origins and
I'm deeply in debt to its practitioners.
Still, I do think they aren't paying enough attention to the possibility
that I've discussed in The Birdcatcher – that humanity isn't a single
entity that can be labeled with a single name like 'Homo Sapiens'. I
think what we are today is a mosaic constructed over a million or more
years, vastly more complex than they say it is. I think 'Homo Sapiens'
includes within it the genes of many different peoples from long ago,
people who, despite all the scientific denials, are still alive in the world
today, but hidden in the complex gene pool of humanity.
Copyright - Alan Conrad
2006
But who are we? Once we've discovered how
inescapable our nature is, we've all had to ask ourselves
that question. We've all thought of the fairytale and
wondered if we too weren't an ugly duckling. But of
course the duck in that story, the duck who couldn't be a
duck no matter how hard he tried, turned out to be a
swan. Another species, and a pretty solitary one at that.
- The Birdcatcher, Chapt XXVII