But this is not a story about Asperger’s, autism, or the spectrum—those very real afflictions that can bring untold hardship to the people who suffer from them and to their families. It is, instead, a story about “Asperger’s,” “autism,” and “the spectrum”—our one-stop-shopping shorthand for the jerky husband, the socially inept plutocrat, the tactless boss, the child prodigy with no friends, the remorseless criminal. It’s about the words we deploy to describe some murky hybrid of egghead and aloof.
Like the actual clinical disorder, the cultural epidemic in scare quotes may have less to do with changes in the world than with changes in those seeing it. To some degree, the spectrum is our way of making sense of an upended social topography, a buckled landscape where nerd titans hold the high ground once occupied by square-jawed captains of industry, a befuddling digital world overrun with trolls and avatars and social-media “rock stars” who are nothing like actual rock stars. It is, as the amateur presidential shrinks would have it, a handy phrase for the distant, cerebral men with the ambition and self-possession necessary to mount a serious run for the White House. When quants and engineers are ascendant, when algorithms trump the liberal arts, when Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber tweet about the death of Steve Jobs, when the hyperspecialist has displaced the generalist and everyone is Matrix-ed into the Internet, it’s an Other-deriding tool to soothe our cultural anxiety about the ongoing power shift from humanists to technologists. As the coders inherit the Earth, saying someone’s on the spectrum is how English majors make themselves feel better.
But anxiety alone (generalized anxiety disorder: 300.02) doesn’t fully explain it. There’s something admiring, too, in the cultural uses of Asperger’s, which makes it different from the psych put-downs du jour of previous eras. The popular but mostly false image of Rain Man–like asocial geniuses (whether on the sitcoms Big Bang Theory and Community, say, or in best-selling books like Jodi Picoult’s novel House Rules and Michael Lewis’s The Big Short) has helped create a mystique around high-functioning autism, and the idea that Asperger’s offers selective advantages has midwifed a generation of self-outers: See, for example, Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page’s Parallel Play: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger’s, or contestant Heather Kuzmich’s appearances on America’s Next Top Model.
And so we find ourselves in a weird place. A psychiatric diagnosis first observed in four boys more than half a century ago has become common slang, a conceptual gadget for processing the modern world. Weirder still: At the same time it soothes the insecurities of those who would weaponize it as insult, it flatters the vanity of those who’d appropriate it as status credential.
by Benjamin Wallace, New York Magazine | Read more:
Illustration by Gluekit
