The human brain is divided into two halves. The left hemisphere is concerned with symbolic thinking, the right is more holistic. Most people are stronger on one side or the other. Some people, however, are strong on both sides, meaning that they can learn faster, observe in more detail, are more attuned to their senses, and can use their imagination to come up with bold new ideas. People with this strength are called “autistic”. Yet as powerful as their brains are, they somehow can’t communicate with other people.
Autistic people “don't fit in”. They don't understand social rules; they’re awkward, weird, “freaks”, etc… So does that mean that autism causes poor social skills?
Indeed, people with autism—like me—struggle to fit in with and understand their peers’ culture and tastes. We often believe—and are told by others—that this means our social skills are weaker due to our brain condition. However, this is in fact a reflection of a society weak at passing on cultural and social norms!
To learn social norms, we must have a social group to learn from. This starts in childhood and affects how we behave in our adult lives. And often, children learn social skills primarily by socializing with other children. This is known as “peer orientation”. A lot of us find this nothing unusual— but it’s actually a very new thing, a 20th-century invention. Before then, it was strictly adults who children learned their culture from. As
explained by doctors Gabor Maté and Gordon Neufeld:
Quote:
Culture, until recently, was always handed down vertically, from generation to generation. For millennia, wrote Joseph Campbell, “the youth have been educated and the aged rendered wise” through the study, experience and understanding of traditional cultural forms. Adults played a critical role in the transmission of culture, taking what they received from their own parents and passing it down to their children. However, the culture our children are being introduced to is much less likely to be the culture of their parents than that of their peers. Children are generating their own culture, very distinct from that of their parents and, in some ways, also very alien. Instead of culture being passed down vertically, it is being transmitted horizontally within the younger generation.
Essential to any culture are its customs, its music, its dress, its celebrations, its stories. The music children listen to bears very little resemblance to the music of their grandparents. The way they look is dictated by the way other children look rather than by the parents’ cultural heritage. Their birthday parties and rites of passage are influenced by the practices of other children around them, not by the customs of their parents before them. If all that seems normal to us, it’s only due to our own peer orientation.
And this is everything an autistic child does not need.
A child’s peers are often obsessed with what they find “cool”. If an autistic child tries to fit in to this peer group, they will tend to go off-topic, paying attention to things no one else notices. Other kids don’t have time for that. They’re not patient. They won’t take the time to explain the rules to their autistic peers,
because a child is not meant to be a teacher. If one child doesn't get it, no use including them. So the autistic child now thinks they don't fit in and that's a problem.
But a lot of kids with autism don't understand that
other children feel the same way. They also fear that they need to “fit in” to satisfy their social needs. and they do not want other children to see it either. But because they don’t have the strong sensory issues that autistic children have, they notice their awkwardness less, and that’s what gives off the impression that their social skills are better.
Autistic children are more awkward not because they feel and adapt to the social atmosphere less — they do it
more easily. And if the social atmosphere is permeated by awkwardness, then awkward is what the autistic child will be.
We can see objective cases of people with autism demonstrating that they can be more socially attuned than others. As an autistic person, I have often found that I have a better sense of other people than those around me. I am less surprised by their behaviours and traits, owing to the close attention I pay to social situations.
Another person I know who has autism told me that he can sustain a friendship longer than other people he knows. Sometimes, he and his friends go a long while without talking to each other, and once this happens, they don’t contact him, either because they forget or because they think it feels awkward. Unlike them, he himself is always willing to be the first to initiate contact. Many people with autism also are extremely honest and reliable: having made a commitment to a friend, we would very rarely break that commitment, no matter how trivial another may see it. In a contemporary social environment where we have few moral obligations to others, this can seem overbearing or odd; but it actually demonstrates an ability and willingness to connect with others that goes far beyond the shallowness of many contemporary friendships.
If we lived in a society that was oriented towards relationships between adults and children, young people with autism would have stronger social supports within which to thrive. Rather than being forced to learn social skills exclusively within the shifting and awkward environments of their peers, they would have adults sharing with them structured social rules. And what’s more, their peers would have the exact same thing! Honesty and reliability are traits that are essential in intergenerational family environments—consistency and unconditional love is part of what makes a family community. Within this sense of security, an autistic child can develop healthy social relationships while still having their differences. A set of societal norms dictated by children cannot do the same. As Neufeld says, "The planets revolve around the sun, not each other."
Of course, many autistic adults are no better, and building community remains difficult. Again, we can attribute this to a lack of social structure, which we humans were really not prepared to deal with. Most of human evolution happened in the pre-industrial world, when our lives were more structured than they are now. A person could reasonably expect that they and their peers would have the same overall lifestyle from birth until death. And since people with autism tend to prefer having predictability, rules, and things making sense, more than other people do, this need for security was fulfilled meaning autism did not have the same stigma it has today. Once autistic people are on board with a shared “cultural narrative” and goals, their unusual moments of insight are
helpful, not detrimental.
The archeologist Penny Spikins even suggests that
autistic traits may have carried significant advantages as far back as the stone age. She suggests, for example, that “the incorporation of an autistic obsession with fairness and rules may have been key to providing highly systemised conventions to circumvent any tendencies to follow allegiances, or react emotionally to the unfamiliar and so may have been critical in promoting collaboration between different groups.”
Most people who have the privilege to receive the autism diagnosis live in industrialized societies, so the common image of autism is subject to a heavy bias.
So it’s really just current social norms (or lack thereof) that sees autism as a disability, or even as a thing at all: a collection of traits to be noticed, defined, and medicalized.
Autistic people are not failing to understand social rules. They are, on an instinctual level,
trying to find social rules, and getting frustrated that there aren’t any.
18 Jul 2021, 7:12 pm
