Does he know that hitting is wrong? He’s been told so often enough and knows that it will meet disapproval, even felt the painful consequences of bad behaviour when other children hit him back, but I’m not sure that he’s worked out the causal relationship. It’s sometimes said that morality is simply an internalised fear of punishment. Even if true, we do normally grasp the rationale; we’re told why bad behaviour is punished and in general we learn to accept the logic. Joe, I suspect, is still unsure why a punch is wrong, and so any chastisement, any moral rebuke, might well seem arbitrary to him. Morality based on whim would struggle for anyone’s assent and so Joe’s disdain for it won’t feel, as far as he’s concerned, wrong.
How aware is Joe of being a living person? As conscious, I imagine, as a fish that it swims in water; namely, not very. He wouldn’t care if you put him in a dress. He’d rather be naked, inside the house or out, in company or alone, presumably expecting others to be as comfortable with his naturism as he is. He has no idea that he was born or that he will die. He’s not much interested in his own reflection, certainly less so than chimpanzees, who are reportedly fascinated once they realise they’re looking at their own image.
He seems to me to exist almost entirely with what he knows and feels there and then. If he is angry, I doubt that he can ever say to himself, as some of us can in our better moments, ‘you’re angry, calm down’; he simply lives on inside his anger until the moment passes.
This is often what we admire when we talk about the innocence of children – a lack of self-awareness. But are we clear that this implies a lack of awareness for others, that without consciousness of ourselves and all our passions and appetites we’ll find it near impossible to imagine the needs, interests, preferences of others? How do we show consideration of other points of view if we expect the world to share ours – indeed, can’t imagine that the rest of the world would hold a different one? Adam Smith said it best in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759: ‘… it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer … that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels …’ This mechanism he imagined to be self evident in every human being ‘how selfish soever man may be supposed’. Smith had not the pleasure of knowing autism, and so never suspected there could be any among us incapable of this imaginative impersonation. Yet even without that instructive example he understood with absolute clarity that moral sentiments depend on worldly sensibility.
Reflection must be an elusive pleasure for Joe and self-consciousness, the ability to have thoughts about our thoughts, is a prerequisite for being able to think about other people’s thoughts. With a limited capacity for one, he cannot hope to achieve much of the other.
Self-consciousness seems to me to be the beginning of virtue, not the end. Once we learn to regard our own thoughts and emotions from a distance, we’ve achieved a kind of objectivity, a grossly deficient one usually, I admit, but we’ve learned to observe ourselves instead of only to inhabit the thought of the moment. If we can make judgements about others, taking the view from there, not only the view from here where we lie deep inside an instant of our own passion, we become capable of recognising and acting on their interests, not just our own. To achieve all this requires a loss of innocence.
For Joe, all the world is his world, and the paradox is that the more complete his egotism the more innocent it makes him. He knows little and can imagine little of the corruptions of my adult mind, because he knows little and can imagine little of my adult mind, full stop. In most children this fades. Upholders of innocence regret its passing. But as it fades, it is supplemented by a growing understanding of the complicated needs and expectations of those around us. We tend to avoid people in whom that doesn’t happen. We think them selfish, uncivilised. How peculiar, then, that in children we call this quality innocence and wish to preserve it.
In the Garden of Eden, the shock of knowledge to Adam and Eve is to be embarrassed with self-consciousness. For with that comes shame, a highly complex emotion, and guilt. So should we now want innocence back? Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, argues that it’s a fallacy to think we can roll back the wheel to pure innocence. There’s no returning to Eden, he says, and quotes Friedrich von Hugel, a Catholic philosopher at the end of the nineteenth century, to the effect that the greatest good for an un-fallen being would be innocence, but the greatest good for a fallen being is forgiveness and reconciliation.
You don’t have to believe in the literal truth of The Fall to get the point. Joe’s innocence is so unknowing and thus often uncaring that it can be violently hurtful. Perhaps in an uncontaminated world, incapable of sin, innocence would be benign, but it strikes me that much of the harm Joe does is because he is not worldly enough. Forgiveness and reconciliation are the qualities of a mature and experienced mind.
This is clear when we take a special case of moral behaviour that causes philosophers a good deal of trouble precisely because of the problem of self-awareness: altruism.
It’s sometimes said that genuine altruism is impossible because we enjoy some benefit ourselves, even if only the warm glow of doing good, so that self-awareness of our actions trumps altruism, with smug self-satisfaction at best, crudely calculating self-interest at worst. Furthermore, says the Darwinian fundamentalist, altruism can never be truly to our disadvantage or it would have been bred out of us: how could it survive natural selection if it did harm to our genetic prospects?
The standard case for those who disagree with the sceptics is what happens when a group of men sees a child beginning to lose balance over the fence around a well. Before reacting, do they pause to calculate the complicated reciprocal obligations by which they might gain from saving the child? Is their rush to haul her back motivated by self-interest?
Evidently not; there’s no time for so much computation. The view either that the rescuers are briskly assessing the child’s parents’ likely wealth and gratitude, or that they do it because it feels good (and so is selfish really), deserves mocking. The philosopher Mary Midgely obliges delightfully. Even an offer from the most skilled pharmacist to induce such a sensation won’t do, she writes: ‘Avengers do not want the sensation of avenging; they want people’s blood. And similarly, rescuers and benefactors do not (if they are real ones) just want the sensation of rescuing and benefacting. They want to help people. This involves wanting the people actually to be helped.’
Serious Darwinians aren’t as crude as some of their bar-room followers and largely concede these points, countering that the computation occurs not in the individual moment, but throughout evolution itself, so that it is not the bystander at the well but natural selection which unconsciously computes the benefit of the altruistic impulse in humanity, and finds it, to some extent in some people, worth preserving.
How do these analyses of altruism stand comparison with Joe’s example? If you really want a model of egotism, here he is. But what makes him so? Certainly not an excess of calculation, since Joe barely stops to calculate other people’s benefit, being scarcely aware that they are capable even of receiving it. Nor is it an excess of self consciousness that wrecks his altruism by causing him to bask in the pleasure of doing good and so proving himself more interested in self congratulation than helping others. In both cases the problem is, in fact, the very opposite: the absence of calculation, calculation in the moment, and the absence of sufficient self-consciousness are together the fatal blows to Joe’s altruism. The surprising conclusion from Joe’s example is that he needs more calculation in order to see the consequences of his actions clearly, and he needs more self consciousness in order to explore that internal model of other people’s feelings which familiarity with our own feelings provides. Only then might his egotism begin to abate.
If, as I’ve argued in relation to Joe, it is self-consciousness that makes altruism possible (only by knowing ourselves can we think about what’s right for others), how can it also be that the presence of self-consciousness during an act makes al
truism impossible? How can the sine qua non of altruism also disqualify it? Some sceptics of altruism seem to me to want to have their cake and eat it; illogical, not to say a little selfish.
What would Joe do watching the child at the well? I suspect he’d not even continue watching. Sympathy or empathy being foreign to him both because of his inability to imagine what others feel and because he’s unable to forsee the effect of his actions, so too is he incapable of altruism. It’s not the presence of self-consciousness that spoils his altruistic instincts, it’s the lack of self-consciousness that means his altruism doesn’t even get started; calculation doesn’t necessarily render our instincts selfish, but lack of calculation certainly does. And the calculation we need is not one honed in our distant past and the refinement of human instinct on the Savannah, it is explicit calculation, today, here and now, about others.
In order to do good, we have to show an awareness of the effects of our actions without straining to build in a pay-off. That, I think, is the midpoint most of us aspire to, all we have time or inclination for. Egotism sufficiently extreme to be fatal to virtue stands only at the far end of the scale in each direction, either in the ruthless maximisation of self-interest or in utter self absorption to the point of ignorance of others, and few of us reside there. Joe, by comparison, teaches us that we’re better than rampant egotists – not in spite of but because of our lost innocence, in part because of our introspection – better than we’re sometimes inclined to give ourselves credit for.
It’s interesting, though, that Joe does say a kind of sorry. As we made our way from the lift out onto the top floor of the car park after the Great Toddler Incident, I tried yet again with a stern face to tell him that hitting was bad. He raised his hand towards me … I flinched ever so slightly … and he stroked my arm with a wide, flat palm, not with gentleness exactly, but calm and conciliatory.
We taught him to do this after he’d been chastised, more as a way of pretending to his sister that he was sorry he’d hurt her than of being sure he really was. I suspect he doesn’t know why this makes amends, nor am I quite sure myself; all I can say is that its timidity reaches into my soft heart more surely than any aggression, and Joe knows at least that it stops the big people going on at him in that noisy way of theirs. Somehow, in spite of its innocence, I find myself falling easily into forgiveness and reconciliation.
‘It’s OK, Joe. It’s OK.’
9
Seeing
The phone call at the beginning of term didn’t shock, to my surprise, but dulled my spirit with weariness: ‘He’s broken his front tooth, head-butting the pavement.’
They’d been on the way to a café, a place he likes (a treat, for heaven’s sake), when Joe’s slow, hopeful haul towards settling in came to grief in splintered enamel. He was not yet ten and it wasn’t the first time he’d broken an adult tooth. That small milestone passed at six years old when he twisted face down on a long, steep slide and stood up at the bottom with a jagged hole in the dead centre of his smile, a goodsized triangle chipped from the corner of each front incisor. You have to marvel at the forces at work that day, vandalising with such symmetry. Nearly three hours under general anaesthetic at Great Ormond Street Hospital produced a small work of art by way of repair, rebuilding Joe’s teeth without crowns, using synthetic enamel, achieving near-perfect colour match and a join barely visible. He fought like hell as he went under, screaming hysterically as they slid the cannula into a vein in that tiny arm, clamped still under two strong adult hands while I grasped his body, trying with futility to whisper to his pain and rage. In the moment the anaesthetic seeped along his arm and touched his brain, it was as if he had been unplugged. When the rabid resistance simply, swiftly, so uncharacteristically left his body, it felt like death, and I cried helplessly.
Beforehand they said: ‘It’ll be fine, don’t worry, we’re used to all sorts of children here.’
Afterwards they said: ‘I see what you mean.’
Now he’d been and gone and done it again. Joe had a habit of provoking feeling as oxymoron; in this case, seething pity. It had long been one of his more frustrating tendencies, the unexplained rebellion, the sudden vote to strike, the freeze, common even when favourite destinations beckoned. Though capable of monumental obstinacy, Joe seemed at these moments to be struck by something more, something physical. He looked oddly uncertain, or terrified; he might shout, slip the hold of an adult hand, lean back as we heaved like the anchor in a tug o’ war. From time to time and without apparent cause Joe would silently stick; that’s how it came to be described, his sticking points. As if suffering the mother of total mechanical breakdowns, his eyes would crease shut and one hand cover his face, the other stretched out to fend off who-knows-what. He’d stick getting out of the car, superglued, one foot in, one foot out, the door wide open in our narrow lane, a rat-run for school traffic which was late, frazzled, and simply made Joe’s sticking more vicious by frightening him with impatient hooting. He’d stick halfway across a road, midway through a shop in some chance aisle as if dithering over a purchase, arrested by the bargain of a two-for-one on cornflakes. He’d stick in doorways, a regular inconvenience this one, like the cartoon of the man tying his lace in front of the sliding tube doors, holding back the flood. The resolute little blob stuck on stairs, stuck going from one room to another. It might happen whenever he was in transition and I’d turn round to find him twenty metres adrift, putting down roots.
Our first instinct was to try to persuade – ‘Come on, Joe!’ – then to wonder if the hand across his eyes meant a headache – ‘What’s wrong, Joe?’ – a problem with bright light, some sudden apprehension? In the end, our habit was to give him half a minute’s grace and then a helping hand here, a hustling voice to jolt him awake there, a good shove in those special cases where the looming HGV added incentive for the rest of us, if not for eyes-tight-shut Joe. In his most frozen moments, I bundled him under an arm.
With luck, the incident on the way to the café was no more than another sticking point and not a resurgence of antipathy to the whole regime, or another attempt to bully it. His spontaneity suggested the former, his violence the latter.
What brings Joe so hard against the buffers? In truth, no one knows, but there is a fascinating suspicion to do with the way he sees the world. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime, by Mark Haddon, an autistic boy’s detective story, is an exuberant, thrilling work of imagination. Its central character, Christopher, is a James Bond among autistics: astonishing, improbable, an artistic creation beyond the bounds of life, but captivating all the same. Moreover, the book achieves the impossible by deriving narrative drive from a character who would typically have only the weakest grasp of psychological motivation. Nevertheless, there are moments of brilliant, speculative insight. One such is when Christopher arrives at Paddington after running away from his father’s house and steps out of the train into the sensory storm of a mainline railway station:
When I saw how big the room was that the train was in and I heard how noisy and echoey it was I had to kneel down on the ground for a bit because I was going to fall over … I groaned to block out the noise and I looked around the big room at all the signs to see if this was London. And the signs said:
Sweet pastries Heathrow Airport Check-In Here Bagel Factory EAT excellence and taste YO! sushi! Stationlink Buses WHSmith MEZZANINE Heathrow Express Clinique First Class Lounge FULLERS easyCar.com The Mad Bishop and Bear Public House Fuller’s London Pride Dixons Our Price Paddington Bear at Paddington Station Tickets Taxis …
And so on for more than half a page. Christopher closes his eyes and counts to fifty ‘because my brain wasn’t working very well’. The suggestion is that he has an attention to the detail of visual images so scrupulous that each and every one of them leaves a perfect fingerprint on Christopher’s memory, and that so much visual information for one so receptive causes an overload. We’re all half guessing what goes on in the brains of autistic
children, but this computer-crash of the mind is a vivid image. Could it be that some such overwhelming sensory cascade is part of Joe’s experience that helps explain why he sticks?
I wouldn’t call his visual memory photographic but it is certainly exceptionally good. My father used to ask, as all fathers ask at the end of a long journey, ‘Do you know where you are yet?’ ‘No,’ we would say, looking but not seeing, dumbfounded, as we rounded the last-but-one corner before home. Joe always knows. By about the age of five I should think he knew every street for miles around and these days I suspect he’s mastered the contour of pretty much every hill between here and Bristol. It used to worry me that one of his escapes might take him confidently to Sainsbury’s in Watford, four miles away. My hunch is that he learnt how to spell by remembering each word as an elaborate shape, noting the way the letters formed its lumps and sticks and curves, because he certainly didn’t do it by remembering larger, more manageable pieces of phonetics. If we imagine a continuum of perspective, intricate detail at one end and the global view at the other, Joe seems to lie well towards a preference for the bitty.
‘What if,’ asks Uta Frith, ‘complex information received by the senses was not processed in the same way by children with autism?’ Her question is a tease, since it suggests that we can learn about the manner of our own perception by contrasting it with those like Joe who may be an indication that there are other ways of organising what we see.
If that sounds preposterous, if it seems obvious that we see what’s there, pretty much as it appears, it’s worth considering a theory of autism Frith helped develop with Francesca Happe, known as ‘weak central coherence’. The name is descriptive: central coherence is the capacity to draw together detail to form a whole so that, for instance, the pieces of a jigsaw cease to be individual pieces once we see the completed picture. Weak coherence, she says, means that the picture never quite coalesces in the mind, means not seeing the whole for the parts, the wood for the trees. An over strong central coherence, on the other hand, might mean not seeing the trees for the wood. Ordinarily, surprisingly perhaps, most of us seem to pick the same units to parcel up the outside world, because, as Frith acknowledges, it would be possible to choose a level of detail a good deal smaller than a tree: a branch, a leaf even, the stepped edges of a single leaf, failing to see the trees for the twigs. We’re quite capable of consciously moving between these levels by refocusing our attention, but most of the time we don’t have to, the eyes of any crowd lurking in much the same focal range. At some level, even autistic children ignore the ever-finer degrees of minutiae into which they could, conceivably, descend, but they do seem inclined to concentrate on smaller bits than the rest of us. At last, someone who’d actually prefer the crumbs at the bottom of the crisp bag.
Joe Page 14
