Cosmic Autism

This is my review of:
William Stillman. "The Soul of Autism." Franklin Lakes: New Page Books, 2008.

As a person who was diagnosed with high-functioning autism I feel that I am in a unique position to comment on William Stillman's recent book "The Soul of Autism." And my feelings are many and mixed such that I am unsure where to start.

I think the first thing I ought to do is to apologize in advance. I will not be gentle with this book. So if William Stillman himself is reading this review, I hope that you will perhaps clarify anything I say that is wrong.

As an atheist the book challenged me perhaps to contemplate God outside of the box into which my theological training so perfectly fit him. But also as an atheist, I was very sceptical of what Stillman had to say.

I think I will break down this review into several parts (posts even?), beginning with my thoughts on Stillman's take on autistic spirituality.

Autistic Intuition: A Spiritual Perspective
Stillman claims that persons with autism often exhibit a keen sense of intuition. He takes this intuition to be something paranormal in nature to the point that he even fears that if he lets things get too far out of hand he will undermine the credibility of his own work by including accounts that sound too far-fetched (p. 27). Stillman cites several accounts of parents describing their childrens' paranormal experiences. I was particularly struck by an account of a young girl who was having nightmares about snakes and spiders, only to encounter a group of benevolent beings who assured her that there were no longer any spiders in her bed (p. 28). That does not sound like an encounter with an angel so much as one with a creature conjured up in the child's mind in order to comfort herself. The religious conjure such benevolent entities all the time.

Indeed, Stillman even implores us not to dismiss the imagination in our spiritual practice, echoing a sentiment I have long held about our society and both the neuro-typicals and the autistics -- that the societies and the technologies we build are products derived heavily from the use of imagination and of creativity (p. 177).

Autistic Intuition: A Rational Perspective
My point is that I do not think it necessary to believe that the intuitive experiences of some autistics are spiritual in nature. Instead, the spiritual aspects they manifest are more likely a set of primitive processes appearing in abstracted form to the conscious mind. For example, consider sexuality. Sexuality is in fact merely the process of producing offspring. However, humans have spent countless hours producing art and languishing in romantic obsessions as a part of their sexual activities. These behaviours are simply sexual desires appearing in abstracted form in the highly advanced mind that we have evolved and then manifesting themselves through the creative acts of poetry, sculpture, paint, etc. There is no otherworldly platonic aspect whatsoever to any of them.

It is unlikely that other animals -- including dolphins, which Stillman apparently thinks capable of very complex language (p. 110f) -- produce poetry and art depicting the objects of their sexual desire. Instead, to put it bluntly, they just fuck one another and produce offspring.

Stillman goes on to claim that some autistic children are capable of recalling deceased relatives (p. 121-125), while others are capable of telepathy (p. 25, 87ff). If indeed there exist autistics with such special abilities then why are they not tested and the repeatability of their alleged gifts demonstrated? The reason is simply that what Stillman calls paranormal abilities are really qualities that can be explained more plausibly in terms of heightened senses of intuition.

You might recall from my previous entry that I drank too much caffeine and when I did so I exaggerated every sensory stimulus that I encountered and I became paranoid. I find that most of the time my mind moves from one thing to another very quickly. I am constantly in thought. I suspect that this increased mental excitation occurs in other autistics to the point that the subtle cues that animals give off, for example, are in the minds of their autistic recipients exaggerated such that they become lucidly imminent, while the otherwise 'normal' neuro-typical receiving the same information might experience only a dim recognition of the cue if anything at all.

The Quest for Acceptance
One of the most disturbing trends I found in Stillman's book was that of young autistics wanting to be accepted into their churches' Sunday schools and rituals. For example, on page 21f, we are given the account of the morally reprehensible conduct of a Catholic church's refusal to give communion to a young autistic, ironically because that church felt that he was "only simulating doing so." The practitioners of other Christian denominations would do well to listen to the hypocrisy inherent in that line of reasoning.

On page 207 we are given the theology of Karly, a 21-year-old woman with Rett's syndrome. I confess that this was for me the most challenging of all the accounts in Stillman's book. Karly claims -- and I believe rightly so -- that "others who are Christians have a very limited view of God." One need only take a course in Dutch Reformed theology to see the truth of that statement. Yet at the same time, "people have complicated God so much." Again, the plethora of doctrines preached by Christian denominations is evidence of the box of legalistic simplification into which most Christians have placed God. After all, it is safer to do that than to run the risk of doing something "counterfeit to Christianity" (see my earlier entry in which I reference Anderson and Park's dangerous book for Christian youth).

What is most dangerous is the insistence of so many of these spiritually liberated autistics on entering the destructive sanctuary offered by the Christian Church. I had to learn the hard way what it is into which they are trying to gain access.

Christianity is among the most destructive creations that humankind has birthed upon this earth. It was only by virtue of the historical lack of technological sophistication that the Christian church was unable to rival Hitler and Stalin in genocidal grotesquery. Indeed, A. C. Grayling in a recent essay muses that "the church has gone from harshness to happy hymns, from Savonarola to snappy sermons, from punishment to the persuasion of marketing ploys. Would the Christian Churches stay the same – 'happy clappy hymns' – if ever they regained the degree of power of life and death, of torture on the rack and burning at the stake, that they once wielded over our daily lives?" (A. C. Grayling. “The Form of Things: Essays on Life, Ideas and Liberty in the 21st Century” London: Phoenix Pub. 2006. p. 98)

There is most certainly no God within the confines of the Christian Church and the autistic growing up in it will be sorely disappointed and even depressed after having his freedom of thought repressed in the name of preventing his thoughts from stumbling upon what is counterfeit to Christianity.