ToughDiamond wrote:
Sure, if you change the distribution, then the typical can becomes the atypical.
It would be an interesting experiment to set up two isolated communities, one purely of Aspies, the other purely of NTs, and see which one ends up with the most happiness and the best standard of living. That would sort out whether or not AS is an impairment when NT pressure is removed.
It's an impairment. It's not as much of an impairment socially (you've probably noticed you communicate with other autistics more easily than with NTs), but other autistic traits can be quite disabling. Transition issues; becoming locked into an activity or a routine whether you like it or not; sensory overload (which can come from something as simple as sunlight and doesn't necessarily require a chaotic environment); auditory/visual/vestibular input processing issues; restricted diets; etc.
Not that an all-Asperger's community couldn't survive; I think it could. A group of specialists who sold their services to the rest of the world could in fact be rather successful. But that is bargaining on there being someone to buy what they're selling, which of course means interdependence, economically at the least. Where'll you get the aides many autistic people need, Asperger's type included? I'm going to guess you'd need to hire NTs, or non-autistic neurodiverse, for some of that, because you aren't going to find enough people with the right special interest to succeed at it. Without NT contact, you'd have to have a community with multiple services available--ex., a meal-delivery service, a laundry service, a house-cleaning service--and affordable to the general public; specialists providing these services. You'd have to get those things established awfully quickly, because your society would include a lot of people who couldn't do one or more of those things for themselves.
Autistic-only societies, once past the initial survival problem, would quickly develop and perfect a wide range of specialized technology to provide the services that there weren't enough specialists to provide; they would have to be very interdependent, though not necessarily very socially cohesive. It might be possible for people to live years without talking to another human being, while at the same time being involved in creating the tech that allowed those other human beings to survive at a very basic level. Without generalists, there wouldn't be much culture to speak of--just a lot of people, tied loosely by friendship and family, or not at all. Unfortunately, a technological collapse would easily spell the death of such a society and its members.
An all-NT community wouldn't be very well off, either. They'd communicate just fine; and they'd be relatively independent; but they wouldn't have the obsessive inventors that let their technology advance. They'd be stuck back in the stone age, with very slow technological process, possibly making great strides in sociology, but not doing much in the way of invention. They'd have fewer members with specialized needs; so they'd do more things for themselves--which, again, encourages independence rather than specialization. A society of generalists would be able to survive a lot of things, but they wouldn't make progress very quickly.
Bottom line, I think, is that we need each other. The mainstream types need the edges of the bell curve to do specialized things; the people at the edges need the social cohesiveness of the people in the middle. Better to teach people to work with those who are different than to dream about a world in which everyone is the same.
18 Feb 2010, 11:11 am
