Aliens
Humans, aliens & autism
Daedalus, Summer 2009 by Hacking, Ian
Contraries illumine what they are not. Aliens, typically from outer space, are almost by definition not human. Current portrayals of aliens may show more about who we, the humans, are than they do about our extragalactic contraries. In portrayal by opposites there is often a large dose of fear: for example, that we may be all too like the aliens we imagine. That leads to a paradox about autism and aliens. A persistent trope in some autism communities is that autistic people are aliens, or, symmetrically, that non-autistic people seem like aliens to autists. Some autists are attracted to the metaphor of the alien to describe their own condition, or to say that they find other people alien. Conversely, people who are not autistic may in desperation describe a severely autistic family member as alien.
I wonder less what this phenomenon shows about autism than what it reveals about what it is to be human. It is to be expected that what contraries teach may not be something hidden, but something that has always been on the surface, almost too banal for us to notice. The revelation of the obvious is not to be despised, for often the obvious is blinding.
Oliver Sacks used a remark by Temple Grandin as the title of an essay about autism, which became the title of his book An Anthropologist on Mars. Grandin, an extraordinarily able autist, had said to Sacks, "Much of the time I feel like an anthropologist on Mars."1 She felt that interactions with other people were often as difficult as interviewing Martians. We move on from Mars to the extragalactic planet Asperg�a, whose denizens have, unfortunately, been exiled to Earth. They find that the inhabitants of Earth are aliens with whom they are forced to share a planet, while earthlings in turn regard them as an alien species.
A nasty variant was used in a disturbing autism awareness sound bite given wide distribution a couple of years ago by the
Daedalus, Summer 2009 by Hacking, Ian
Contraries illumine what they are not. Aliens, typically from outer space, are almost by definition not human. Current portrayals of aliens may show more about who we, the humans, are than they do about our extragalactic contraries. In portrayal by opposites there is often a large dose of fear: for example, that we may be all too like the aliens we imagine. That leads to a paradox about autism and aliens. A persistent trope in some autism communities is that autistic people are aliens, or, symmetrically, that non-autistic people seem like aliens to autists. Some autists are attracted to the metaphor of the alien to describe their own condition, or to say that they find other people alien. Conversely, people who are not autistic may in desperation describe a severely autistic family member as alien.
I wonder less what this phenomenon shows about autism than what it reveals about what it is to be human. It is to be expected that what contraries teach may not be something hidden, but something that has always been on the surface, almost too banal for us to notice. The revelation of the obvious is not to be despised, for often the obvious is blinding.
Oliver Sacks used a remark by Temple Grandin as the title of an essay about autism, which became the title of his book An Anthropologist on Mars. Grandin, an extraordinarily able autist, had said to Sacks, "Much of the time I feel like an anthropologist on Mars."1 She felt that interactions with other people were often as difficult as interviewing Martians. We move on from Mars to the extragalactic planet Asperg�a, whose denizens have, unfortunately, been exiled to Earth. They find that the inhabitants of Earth are aliens with whom they are forced to share a planet, while earthlings in turn regard them as an alien species.
A nasty variant was used in a disturbing autism awareness sound bite given wide distribution a couple of years ago by the