As I reread what I wrote last time, I noticed, in addition to a few typos, that it still seemed a shallow treatment of this issue. I thought that today I would address two issues that are of utmost importance to myself: Asperger's and religious belief and socially constructed Asperger's. I shall begin with the second first, apropos given that the first shall be last, et cetera.
What do I mean when I say that Asperger's might just be a socially constructed artifact? Well, from this aporia let me continue by saying that there is no one normality in human behavior. There is rather a range or spectrum of behaviors. Some of these are functionally adaptive, meaning that they lead to success. Others are maladaptive; that is, they lead to failure. These can be maladaptive or functionally adaptive in various spheres. For example, the ability to concentrate on one issue or thing may be useful in studies or science, but it might be maladaptive for social situations where stimuli are many and transient. This means that the degree of adaptivity or maladaptivity is relative to the frame of reference from which it is viewed.
Human behavior ranges widely and the variety of behaviors and traits is difficult to comprehend. However, for any individual, his behavior is defined as normative by the society in which he lives. Thus, for example, when I board a bus or train in America and there is only one other person on board, it is typical in America for me to seat myself a fair distance from that person. Alternatively, if there are lots of people who enter at once, they will most likely each try to space themselves equidistantly (if possible) throughout the train. However, on my brief experiences abroad in the Arab World, I have noticed that people tend to group together. when they board a train or a bus. Now, let me state in all fairness that public transit in Egypt as I experienced was much more widely used and the city had a much larger population, but I couldn't help notice that people, when there were empty spaces, tended to prefer being around other people.
It is difficult to define what is normal in human behavior, even within a single society or group. I have recently been reading Umberto Eco's "Kant and the Platypus," which treats semiotics and linguistics. He discusses how language shapes our understanding as well the interplay of cognition and language. Frankly, I find much of it arcane, since I am not an expert in semiotics, but I can understand his greater arguments. For example, in the first chapter he discusses Being, the mere fact of existence. No one can adequately define what it is to exist without generating a tautology. If you say, To be is to exist; you have merely restated in your predicate what you said in your subject. You can try a negative approach (and this is popular both in metaphysics and its less rigorous cousin mysticism) by saying, Being is not being nothing.
Eco argues that while we cannot define Being, we cannot let it mean everything (and hence mean nothing at all), but nor can we define strict limits. Instead, we have "resistances" as he terms them. We can't define exactly why a cat and a dog are different, but they are. Something resists them being lumped together in the same genera. This means that as we trying to assay experience, we run into "resistances" that force us to categorize what is around us. Like the blind men and the elephant, we grope and feel. We are aware that there is a boundary, but the harder we try to pin it down, the farther it slips away. Imagine, for example, a cloud. From far away a cloud (and let us take a nice fluffy cumulonimbus since they are my favorite) has a very distinct border that separates it from blue sky. True, there may be wispy fringes, but in general, if you were asked to describe the boundary of the cloud, it appears very evident. However, the closer you draw to the cloud, the less clear this liminality becomes. Blue becomes gray becomes white without every showing a clear boundary. Still, we know when we are in a cloud and when we are out of a cloud. These two facts exists, but they overlap like a Venn diagram creating a space that is both cloud and sky while also being neither cloud nor sky!
Human behavior is much more complicated but analogous. It seems clear that many people fall along a continuum in various fields of behavior such as sociality, deliberateness, introversion, et cetera. Human beings exhibit many different behaviors and in each of these they fall within a wide range along the spectrum and so the individual can be quite complex behaviorally. It seems likely, however, that some behaviors are interrelated and that the relationship among them complex. The degree of one behavior influences the degree of another (as I noted before). I will not, however, go into that here. Another time, perhaps.
All human societies have normative behaviors that are both obvious and impossible to pin down. These are often termed (negatively) "stereotypes", or (positively) "traditional values." Like our cloud, we cannot always pin down the boundaries of these behaviors, but the center seems clear and is orbited by a periphery of interrelated and dependent behaviors that arise from and influence one another in a fashion that I will not attempt to delineate here (both because it is beyond the scope of my interests for this essay and because I am not qualified to discuss it).
It American society, where in recent years there has been an explosion of Autism spectrum diagnoses, we live in a society that sociologists term "low context" culture. That means that unlike a more homogeneous society like Finland or Japan, Americans have much less shared cultural and interpersonal shared meaning. Norms of behavior are much less rigid here. That means that each individual much be constantly interpreting the signs around him anew. Non-verbal communications are not a given in our society as they might be in Japan. Individuality matters much more. We Americans praise our individuals and make heroes of the mavericks (a word, naturally, coined in the American West and originally referred to a stray calf). However, the down side of the low context culture means that each of us must put much more effort into understanding others.
This low context, highly individualized society makes it difficult for persons who might have a predisposition towards having difficulty distinguishing the subtle non-verbal clues. In fact, studies (and my own experience have shown) that people on the the Autistic Spectrum fare well in structured environments where the societal relationships are well defined. Thus, it would seem, persons diagnosed with "Asperger's" in America, might, in Japan, be fairly well integrated by virtue of the fact that they need not be constantly trying to figure out verbal clues. These structured rules of interaction allow him or her to concentrate their efforts on other issues and thus they are able to be more successful at navigating society. However, those same persons in America would find society almost unmanageable because without rules, the subtle clues are too numerous and contradictory to make out. Thus what is a strength in one culture, leads to failure in another for the individual with Asperger's would feel liberated in the high context culture while someone with a more maverick personality would feel constrained. This means there might be disorders in Japan that would have no social meaning here.
Early psychologists used to speak of women suffering from "Hysteria" (a typically female's only disease according these all-male scientists who thus named it from the Greek word for uterus). In a repressive, Victorian middle class society, suffering from nerves was a natural for women who could find no outlet for their frustrations. This "disorder" has all but ceased to exist. In southern Egypt and the Sudan, there exists the Zar cult among traditional societies. This cult (in the ethnographic sense, not the pejorative sense) is confined mostly to women. In the Zar cult, women become possessed by spirits, frequently male spirits, and under the influence of this spirit, they act and speak like men. Men in the community will even treat women under the influence of the Zar spirit (which comes from the Arabic word for visitor) as a man. In a society where women have no voice, those who struggle against the social norms have no outlet and so they become men in order to give vent to this possible subconscious desire.
These examples show that some "disorders" might very well be socially construed. They represent the inability of certain segments of society to adapt to the prevailing societal norms. For people like me, who thrive on order and structure, our inability to adapt to the chaotic social norms of American culture manifests itself as "Asperger's Syndrome." This is not to argue that all the behaviors and traits of Asperger's are socially constructed. If any reader things I have argued that, then either I have done a poor job of explaining myself, or the read has done a poor job of reading. My argument may be summed up thus: Whether it be due to nature, nurture, or both, there are those whose personality traits are ill suited to the prevailing societal norms. These traits, neither good nor bad per se, lead to classes of behaviors. Under a society where these traits are maladaptive, these behaviors become a disorder; whereas under different conditions, these traits might be an asset. Let it be said, however, that even under contrary society where said traits are maladaptive, they may still bear fruit if only fruit choked by weeds.
As the hour is late and the words verbose, I will save my second theme; Asperger's and Mormonism, until a later entry.
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