Men Who Are Odd-or Autistic 

Men Who Are Odd-or Autistic

I've borrowed a book on Lord Salisbury, something I've wanted for a long time. He was an intelligent Conservative Prime Minister of Britain toward the end of the Victorian era. I've read a short biography, and I want to read a longer one. But I'm also interested in his own writings; he was praised for commentary on foreign policy, before he was praised for his practice of it.

The book is Lord Salisbury on Politics, edited by Paul Smith.

For now I want to focus on this.

[blockquote]He was one of those human beings who have serious difficulty in coming to terms with the world around them and in achieving a tolerable mode of living. As a child, losing his mother before he was ten, he was solitary and starved of the affection which his nature demanded. [After being bullied at Eton] he lived in real fear of a childish brutality to which he could offer no reply beyond a violent but impotent rage, and the experience may well, as his daughter suggests, have done permanent harm both to his nerves and to his capacity for personal relations...a somewhat isolated fugure, reserved, painfully fastidious, and so absolute in his moral and intellectual attitudes and opinions as to make friendship with those who disagreed with them virtually impossible....almost pathetically under-equipped to cope with adult life....Even routine social intercourse was a trial....a neurotic of the first water....liable to the crises which he called 'nerve storms', bringing depression, lassitude, and a hypersensitiveness of touch and hearing....The exhilaration of battle overrode his habitual intellectual pessimism...[he criticized political movements as if they were a threat to his personal physical security]...an almost morbid diffidence...an ideal of moral perfection....He had in many respects a very limited direct experience and perception of [the reality outside himself]. His sensory receiving apparatus...was conspicuously defective...remarkably lacking in visual sense and in powers of direct observation....Nor could imagination supply what he failed to sense, for that faculty was not, except in moments of nervous excitement, strong in him....lack of capacity for making contact with other people....self-centred indifference to them...did not possess the power of animal apprehension of another personality...could not make an instinctive judgment of character....His intuitive understanding of others was so weak that their motives and feelings were frequently incomprehensible to him....[/blockquote]

In today's world we tend to react to descriptions like this by saying this may be high-functioning autism--perhaps Asperger's Syndrome in particular.

Canadian golfer Moe Norman died recently, and several people, including Colby Cosh on his blog, have made that suggestion about him.

Some have made the same suggestion about the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould.

In the article I just linked to, a psychiatrist says categorically Gould did not have autism. The main reason is that autism--even the high-functioning variety of Asperger's syndrom, displays a "triad" of linked or overlapping "impairments": "reciprocal social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and a restricted range of imaginative activities." Gould did not show these, particularly in early childhood when, according to the classic accounts, they would be at their most severe.

Here is what Oliver Sacks says in his great essay on Temple Grandin, "An Anthropologist on Mars": the triad of impairments "is only one hypothesis among many; no theory, as yet, encompasses the whole range of phenomena to be seen in autism."

It does seem that it many cases autism is severe in early childhood (perhaps beginning about age 2); with Asperger's we may be seeing people who are always less severe, and who use their intelligence and support from others to adapt.

[blockquote]But though there may indeed be a devastating picture at the age of three, some autistic youngsters, contrary to expectations, may go on to develop fair language, a modicum of social skills, and even high intellectual achievements; they may develop into autonomous human beings, capable of a life that may at least appear full and normal--even though, beneath it, there may remain a persistent, and even profound, autistic singularity. Asperger had a clearer idea of this possibility than Kanner [the two described autism, by this name, independently]; hence we now speak of such "high-functioning" autistic individuals as having Asperger's syndrome.[/blockquote]

Here is the part of Sacks' essay that always gets to me the most:

Whether Asperger's syndrome is radically different from classical infantile autism (in a child of three, all forms of autism may look the same) or whether there is a continuum from the severest cases of infantile autism ... to the most gifted, high-functioning individuals, is a matter of dispute....It is also unclear whether this continuum should be extended to include the possession of isolated "autistic traits"--peculiar, intense preoccupations and fixations, often combined with relative social withdrawal or remoteness--such as one encounters in any number of people conventionally called "normal" or seen, at most, as a little odd, eccentric, pedantic, or reclusive.