[p2p-research] The Age of Asperger: modern society is autistic!

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: The Age of Asperger: modern
society is autistic! via The Imprinted Brain by Christopher Badcock,
Ph.D. on 4/16/10

According to DSM IV (TR), autism is characterized by markedly abnormal
or impaired social interaction/communication with deficits in:
eye-contact/body language; peer relations/friendships; language/speech
etc. But so too is modern society, where you find similar impairments.
Unlike traditional, small-scale societies where everyone knows everyone
else in the locality and shares the same language, values, and
mentality, most people you meet in modern Western societies are
strangers, with most individuals encountered unknown by name, and with
many different language and cultural groups. No longer can you assume
that the person you are talking to in a modern Western society has the
local tongue as their first language, or that they share any of your
cultural beliefs and traditions. On the contrary, you have to be
careful not to imply any such thing for fear of giving offence, and you
have to be particularly wary with things like eye-contact,
body-language, and gesture, which can easily be misinterpreted. The
result is that even indigenous natives are no longer at home in their
own society, and we have instead what sociologists have termed anomie,
alienation, narcissism, or atomization, with privatized religion and
politics and high incidence of sole-occupancy and isolated family
structure.



James Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone, sounds as if it should be about
autism, but in fact it illustrates exactly the point I am making.
According to him, “the classic institutions of American civic life,
both religious and secular, have been hollowed out… across a very wide
range of activities, the last several decades have witnessed a striking
diminution in regular contacts with our friends and neighbours… We
spend less time in conversation over meals, we exchange visits less
often, we engage less in leisure activities that encourage casual
social interaction, we spend more time watching and less time doing. We
know our neighbours less well, and we see old friends less often.”



More specifically, modern Western societies are characterized by high
incidence of single-parenthood and divorce; high rates of crime,
anti-social behaviour, and delinquency; privatization of sex and its
divorce from reproduction, with approval of masturbation (by far the
most autistic of sexual practices and one that was anathematized to an
astonishing extent up until quite recently); secularization and
privatization of religion, fragmentation of politics, with a loss of
normative consensus and a cult of individualism and self-realization
encouraged by cynicism about collective ideologies and institutional
beliefs.



The causes are clear. Urbanization means that social groups are too
large and anonymous to allow personal familiarity. Multi-culturalism
means that society is too heterogeneous to sustain a common mental
culture and that the host culture is disqualified from dominance. Rapid
social change combined with increased life expectancy means that older
individuals become alienated and disorientated as values change or
reverse in their lifetimes, while the young reject them and their
mental world as out-of-date and irrelevant.



Other important factors are an advanced division of labor, with social
and mental specialization; bureaucracy, routinization, and regulation;
the emergence of experts, consultants, and self-appointed authorities;
single-issue pressure groups, parties, and politics; single-focus
leisure activities, hobbies, and life-styles along with a cult of
individualism with tolerance of eccentricity and outsiders. All of
these illustrate DSM IV’s second set of criteria for autism: restricted
repertoire of activities and interests: stereotyped/repetitive
behaviour; abnormally restricted or intense interests; insistence on
routines/rituals; preoccupation with parts/details.



In other words, modern, multi-cultural societies could be seen as
essentially autistic in nature: something which describes both their
strengths and their weaknesses. No wonder then, that there has been a
Flynn Effect (see a previous post). Sociologically, this could be seen
as the equivalent of the high but uneven IQ found in Asperger’s
syndrome, with what you might call the Bowling Alone aspect reflecting
the mentalistic deficits of high-functioning autism, and the
scientific, technological, and engineering triumphs of modern society
the corresponding mechanistic compensations.



Indeed, you could see modern Western culture as the epitome of autistic
savantism in many respects. Although we rely on computers to perform
the feats of rote memory, instant recall, and lightning calculation you
would otherwise only find in autistic savants, you could regard our
cultural and economic reliance on computing as a form of collective
autistic savantism. Whether we like it or not, mechanistic
cognition—not mentalism as hitherto—is increasingly the foundation of
our civilization, and is incrementally institutionalized in technology,
engineering, and science. All of us are to this extent autistic and
find ourselves living increasingly in what you could justly call the
age of Asperger.

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