www.journeyswithautism.com
www.autismandempathy.com
Link to Part One of this essay
Hurt feelings, oversimplifications, and The Science of Evil
Suffering is nearly always the consequence of ascribing an inborn dearth of humanity to any child born to two human parents. And this is why any assertion that autistic people are born with a deficit in a core component of humanity is so terribly, terribly troubling to me.
I’m not talking about someone hurting my feelings, as Simon implies. What I’m concerned about are ill-conceived definitions and unwarranted conclusions that have the potential to cause tremendous suffering for autistic people at the hands of the larger world.
So, when Simon takes processing and communication difficulties and makes them evidence of an empathy disorder, then I have a problem.
And when, in a post for the Autism Blogs Directory, his words do not reflect the manner in which he describes our capacity for affective empathy in his latest book, my concerns only increase.
Consider the following: In his September 10th post, he provides a chart to explain the way that he profiles autistics and psychopaths in his recently published popular science book The Science of Evil (entitled Zero Degrees of Empathy in the UK). The chart in his blog post shows psychopaths and autistics with profiles that are a mirror-image of each other: psychopaths are positive for cognitive empathy but negative for affective empathy (they can intuitively read how people are feeling, but they don’t care), while autistics are negative for cognitive empathy and positive for affective empathy (we can’t intuitively read how people are feeling, but once we understand that a person is upset, we’re upset, too).
However, the information on this chart does not accurately represent the autistic profile that Simon delineates in The Science of Evil. For example, in a matrix in the latter part of the book, one finds that the profiles of psychopaths and autistics are not mirror images of each other; psychopaths show the same profile as in the blog post, but the autistic profile is negative for both cognitive and affective empathy (Table 1: Distinct Profiles of the Empathy Disorders, 154).
In fact, in contrast to his statement in his post that “people with autism are very capable of an empathic response,” The Science of Evil is relentless in its portrayal of the autistic capacity for affective empathy as highly impaired. In order to illustrate the nature of Asperger’s Syndrome, for example, Simon introduces a 52-year-old adult named Michael, whose dream “is to live in a world without people, where he can have total control.” Michael not only fails to read nonverbal signals, but “does not know how to respond to someone else’s feelings,” even when they are explicit (99).
The book does not differentiate between Michael not knowing what to do and not having an affective response at all.
The book does not explore the possibility that Michael may have long since shut down his emotional responses because of severe empathic and sensory overload, fear, anxiety, shunning, loneliness, bullying, despair, and other life experiences common to autistic people.
The book does not explore the possibility that Michael dreams of being alone because he seeks to comfort himself, in the midst of acute difficulties to which the world is largely oblivious, with a fantasy of control.
The book does not explore the possibility that Michael systemizes to an extreme degree in order to exert control over an extreme intensity of empathic and sensory experience.
And the book does not provide the story of Michael as only one example of the complexity of response among autistic people. It presents Michael as representative. Nowhere does Simon narrate any scenario in which any autistic person shows any affective empathic response to the feelings of another person. In fact, he does the following:
1. He asserts, without qualification of any kind, that for people with Asperger’s and people with classic autism, “Other people’s behavior is beyond comprehension, and empathy is impossible,” placing us all on the zero end of the empathy scale (117).
2. He then attempts to redeem autistic people as “Zero-Positive” (rather than “Zero-Negative,” which is reserved for psychopaths) because our “empathy difficulties” are associated with “having a brain that processes information in ways that can lead to talent” (citing the work of the savants Daniel Tammett, Derek Paravicini, and Peter Myers), and because “Zero-Positive” individuals are responsible for innovations in technology, science, mathematics, and other “systemizing” fields (96, 106-107, 122). Of course, he thereby leaves out the vast majority of autistic people who have no savant gifts and no special talent for innovation in any field at all. Hundreds of thousands of us therefore lose the already dubiously redemptive “Positive” label.
3. He goes to great lengths to insist that people with Asperger’s develop a moral code not because we are informed by an empathic response to others, but only out of a drive to systemize. When others act unethically, he writes, people with Asperger’s leap to the defense of the injured party -- not because we are moved by empathy for the other person, but because unethical behavior “violates the moral system” we have “constructed through brute logic alone” (emphasis mine) (123). In other words, we’re simply upset that the rules have been broken.
Of course, this explanation rather begs the question of why anyone without an empathic response to the difficulties of other people would construct a moral code in the first place.
4. He characterizes people with classic autism as viewing their parents as “nothing more than a vending machine” to serve their desires. He thereby places people with classic autism outside the field of both empathic and ethical response, calling them “Morality-Negative” (119, 154).
And then he asserts in a post on the Autism Blogs Directory, four months after the publication of his book, that people with autism are, in fact, “very capable of an empathic response” -- an assertion that appears nowhere, explicitly or implicitly, in the pages of The Science of Evil, published on two continents, and reviewed by critics the world over.
When someone writes a popular science book that will be read by far more people than any post on any blog, and in that book fails to address the depth and complexity of autistic experience, then we have a number of potential problems on our hands.
This is not about anyone hurting my feelings. It’s about the perpetuation of stereotypes and oversimplifications that, in my opinion, have the potential for tremendous harm. Consider the possibilities:
Autistic people describe our empathic experiences in detail, only to be told that we have such low empathy that we are the last to know it.
Autistic people protest abuse and ill-treatment, only to be told that we can’t understand other people’s motives and intentions, much less respond to them appropriately.
Autistic people are treated without empathy because other people believe that we have none ourselves.
Autistic people face lives of substandard care, isolation, and abuse because we are considered to have been born without a core component of humanity.
Autistic people lose opportunities for love, for friendship, and for caregiving work because people believe that we are incapable of them.
Autistic people lose our sense of who we are because we have to endure a constant and unrelenting barrage of messages that tell us that we are something else.
