It is always an adventure on the road, and this last trip through the east to Connecticut was no exception. A blow-out tire on the pop-up camper in Ohio led us to change to the spare with trucks whizzing past us only feet away in the tightness of a work zone, and on the way back, a recent accident closed our exit to a campsite in Indiana, forcing us to put on another 60 miles to someplace new. The latter was instructive, for I felt that this would lead to something better for us, and in did, to a beautiful state park, in spite of my ill temper.
For road travel adventure, though, the best for me are the books on CD’s if they are good, and this latest for our way back was very good.
As with another a month or so ago, this one dealt with autism, which has drawn me for reasons both known and unknown, pulling me into this epidemic of mind disaster much the same way the accident in Indiana led me to a better campsite, for autism seems to be leading me somewhere. On this last trip, I got a clue. Perhaps, like much of what we think about autism, this clue is only an anomaly, but perhaps not. If I am right, it is big news indeed.
The book is The Spark (a mother’s story of nurturing genius) by Kristine Barnett, a tale of frustration and tragedy that led Barnett to an amazing discovery. It begins as this over-achieving woman finds that her first child, after the first year and a half, is suddenly falling behind the classic milestones of development. He begins to talk less, then not at all; his skills at blocks and so on begin to fail; and he no longer is interested in cuddling or having emotional contact whatsoever. She brings in experts and chews her nails, hoping her boy is not what she fears, only to find that he is – he is pronounced by the experts as having Asperger’s, a mild form of autism. While she finds some relief from this, she is beaten down again: his Asperger’s will regress until he totally disappears from the human world into deep autism. She is told that he will be lucky to be able to tie his own shoes by the time he is 16.
Recovering from her shock, she remains true to form and dives in to all manners of therapy until the early developmental money from the state runs out. Then she takes over herself, spending every minute extra of her busy, busy day doing what the experts were doing – going over rote skills again and again in an attempt to bring the child towards some low level of normal achievement. But nothing works. Her son continues to, as she says, disappear.
Then she has a brainstorm: what if there really was a full person “in there” as she has continued to suspect? What if the clue to developing that child to his fullest would be reached not by making him an incomplete replica of the normal, but more fully himself? And what if, by doing that, she is able to connect with that person within, and bring him out into the society of people around him?
She tries and is successful beyond her wildest imaginings. Because her son was interested in astronomy books (for reasons she did not understand), one day she brings him to a planetarium for an advertised chance to look at Mars through a telescope. When she gets there with tickets bought, she finds that they first must sit with a group of college students in a lecture. She almost leaves. But her son is adamant about staying, and even though she is bored by the lecture, he seems to be interested. Very interested. By the end, this 3 year old boy is conversing with the lecturer, able to answer questions that none of the college students can. He talks fully and in a relaxed manner, and everyone else there recognizes his specialness. Here she comes to learn that her child is not only different but a genius.
She starts an after-daycare school for other autistic children (she runs the daycare as her job) with this insight, and is fully rewarded: each of the autistic kids has at least one specialty in which they are fully engrossed. She learns that to reach them, she must enter into that field of interest. Once contacted on that level, she is able to draw them out into the shared social world. She finds that, all along, the kids were not interested in the things of the normal world, and so withdrew. But they had not disappeared to themselves within – only to those without.
In this, she finds that the experts had gotten it all wrong – that they had remained glued to their own world and had only tried to bring the autistic kids out to a place where they could never fully perform. She finds that her own genius son would have been ruined if she had continued the professional route. All this, I, in reading (hearing) this, had already understood. But something more stood out to me as a possibility for the first time.
Autism: those given that label have grown many fold in the past 30 years for reasons not fully understood. Perhaps it is because women are having children later, or because of environmental poisons, or simply because the specialists are more prone to label odd kids with this diagnosis. Of the latter, this may be so because our society is much more conformist than it used to be. This was understood in the 19th and early 20th century when people saw how individualist farmers now had to conform to certain patterns of behavior for the modern workplace, but we have forgotten this in our century and have confused individualism for tattoos and certain forms of sexual behavior. In fact, a famer could much more easily be “weird” back on his own forty acres in the old days than, say, at the office of Clinger, Clinger and Chaser nowadays. But there might be much more. This might instead be an evolutionary trend.
Evolutionists tell us that with every change in a species that is beneficial, there is usually the loss of some other trait that is not as fundamental for survival. We humans, for instance, with our greater cognitive skills, were able to create effective weapons, but in the process lost much of our speed and strength. These would be cool to have, yes, but because they are no longer necessary, time has taken them from us.
So it might work with autism. Thanks to people like Barnett who have truly been able to step inside the mind of those with autism, we have come to understand that those with autism are specialists, able to do absolutely amazing things with their particular abilities. But this comes at the cost of over-all general fitness on both the physical and social levels. While it is true that they are able to come back into the normal fold somewhat once their ability is recognized and appreciated by the outside world, most will never have that generalist ability for contemplating the absurd or socializing, a complex skill in itself.
These traits, however, are becoming less and less important. We have become so interconnected and specialized in our daily work world that our ability to generalize might be seen as a handicap. We will, after all, never be as bright mathematically as Barnett’s son, even if we get each other’s jokes. As our individualism is parred down for the interconnected workplace, our social complexities might become superfluous. What if each of us instead were born focused on a few particular specialties to the near-exclusion of others? We would be geniuses of a sort in that specialty, and if we were all connected as it looks like we soon will be, we would function infinitely better as a collective.
This would look much like Arthur Clark’s Childhood’s End, where the minds of most of the world’s children became merged into one great mass through mental telepathy, after which they “wooshed” off the world to some greater destination. The difference here is that this “telepathy,” at least at first, would be provided by electronic communications. But the result would be the same; we would have an infinitely more advanced world where the collective genius would far exceed the efforts of the individuals as we now have.
Yes, Childhood’s End might be where we are headed, but in a way most of us never thought. It could be right before us in the onrush of autism, which might soon bring us to Clark’s thought-collective. This idea might repulse us, but hunters and gatherers were often repulsed by civilization, which was certain to dominate the world because of its greater collective energy.
This could be humanity’s great breakthrough, brought to us by a curious and unexpected form of evolution that one might say is both naturally and divinely directed - as I believe evolution has always been. And only God knows where it will bring us in the distant future. FK
For road travel adventure, though, the best for me are the books on CD’s if they are good, and this latest for our way back was very good.
As with another a month or so ago, this one dealt with autism, which has drawn me for reasons both known and unknown, pulling me into this epidemic of mind disaster much the same way the accident in Indiana led me to a better campsite, for autism seems to be leading me somewhere. On this last trip, I got a clue. Perhaps, like much of what we think about autism, this clue is only an anomaly, but perhaps not. If I am right, it is big news indeed.
The book is The Spark (a mother’s story of nurturing genius) by Kristine Barnett, a tale of frustration and tragedy that led Barnett to an amazing discovery. It begins as this over-achieving woman finds that her first child, after the first year and a half, is suddenly falling behind the classic milestones of development. He begins to talk less, then not at all; his skills at blocks and so on begin to fail; and he no longer is interested in cuddling or having emotional contact whatsoever. She brings in experts and chews her nails, hoping her boy is not what she fears, only to find that he is – he is pronounced by the experts as having Asperger’s, a mild form of autism. While she finds some relief from this, she is beaten down again: his Asperger’s will regress until he totally disappears from the human world into deep autism. She is told that he will be lucky to be able to tie his own shoes by the time he is 16.
Recovering from her shock, she remains true to form and dives in to all manners of therapy until the early developmental money from the state runs out. Then she takes over herself, spending every minute extra of her busy, busy day doing what the experts were doing – going over rote skills again and again in an attempt to bring the child towards some low level of normal achievement. But nothing works. Her son continues to, as she says, disappear.
Then she has a brainstorm: what if there really was a full person “in there” as she has continued to suspect? What if the clue to developing that child to his fullest would be reached not by making him an incomplete replica of the normal, but more fully himself? And what if, by doing that, she is able to connect with that person within, and bring him out into the society of people around him?
She tries and is successful beyond her wildest imaginings. Because her son was interested in astronomy books (for reasons she did not understand), one day she brings him to a planetarium for an advertised chance to look at Mars through a telescope. When she gets there with tickets bought, she finds that they first must sit with a group of college students in a lecture. She almost leaves. But her son is adamant about staying, and even though she is bored by the lecture, he seems to be interested. Very interested. By the end, this 3 year old boy is conversing with the lecturer, able to answer questions that none of the college students can. He talks fully and in a relaxed manner, and everyone else there recognizes his specialness. Here she comes to learn that her child is not only different but a genius.
She starts an after-daycare school for other autistic children (she runs the daycare as her job) with this insight, and is fully rewarded: each of the autistic kids has at least one specialty in which they are fully engrossed. She learns that to reach them, she must enter into that field of interest. Once contacted on that level, she is able to draw them out into the shared social world. She finds that, all along, the kids were not interested in the things of the normal world, and so withdrew. But they had not disappeared to themselves within – only to those without.
In this, she finds that the experts had gotten it all wrong – that they had remained glued to their own world and had only tried to bring the autistic kids out to a place where they could never fully perform. She finds that her own genius son would have been ruined if she had continued the professional route. All this, I, in reading (hearing) this, had already understood. But something more stood out to me as a possibility for the first time.
Autism: those given that label have grown many fold in the past 30 years for reasons not fully understood. Perhaps it is because women are having children later, or because of environmental poisons, or simply because the specialists are more prone to label odd kids with this diagnosis. Of the latter, this may be so because our society is much more conformist than it used to be. This was understood in the 19th and early 20th century when people saw how individualist farmers now had to conform to certain patterns of behavior for the modern workplace, but we have forgotten this in our century and have confused individualism for tattoos and certain forms of sexual behavior. In fact, a famer could much more easily be “weird” back on his own forty acres in the old days than, say, at the office of Clinger, Clinger and Chaser nowadays. But there might be much more. This might instead be an evolutionary trend.
Evolutionists tell us that with every change in a species that is beneficial, there is usually the loss of some other trait that is not as fundamental for survival. We humans, for instance, with our greater cognitive skills, were able to create effective weapons, but in the process lost much of our speed and strength. These would be cool to have, yes, but because they are no longer necessary, time has taken them from us.
So it might work with autism. Thanks to people like Barnett who have truly been able to step inside the mind of those with autism, we have come to understand that those with autism are specialists, able to do absolutely amazing things with their particular abilities. But this comes at the cost of over-all general fitness on both the physical and social levels. While it is true that they are able to come back into the normal fold somewhat once their ability is recognized and appreciated by the outside world, most will never have that generalist ability for contemplating the absurd or socializing, a complex skill in itself.
These traits, however, are becoming less and less important. We have become so interconnected and specialized in our daily work world that our ability to generalize might be seen as a handicap. We will, after all, never be as bright mathematically as Barnett’s son, even if we get each other’s jokes. As our individualism is parred down for the interconnected workplace, our social complexities might become superfluous. What if each of us instead were born focused on a few particular specialties to the near-exclusion of others? We would be geniuses of a sort in that specialty, and if we were all connected as it looks like we soon will be, we would function infinitely better as a collective.
This would look much like Arthur Clark’s Childhood’s End, where the minds of most of the world’s children became merged into one great mass through mental telepathy, after which they “wooshed” off the world to some greater destination. The difference here is that this “telepathy,” at least at first, would be provided by electronic communications. But the result would be the same; we would have an infinitely more advanced world where the collective genius would far exceed the efforts of the individuals as we now have.
Yes, Childhood’s End might be where we are headed, but in a way most of us never thought. It could be right before us in the onrush of autism, which might soon bring us to Clark’s thought-collective. This idea might repulse us, but hunters and gatherers were often repulsed by civilization, which was certain to dominate the world because of its greater collective energy.
This could be humanity’s great breakthrough, brought to us by a curious and unexpected form of evolution that one might say is both naturally and divinely directed - as I believe evolution has always been. And only God knows where it will bring us in the distant future. FK
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