As talked about in this post, the other side of stereotyping autistic people, is positive stereotyping:
So, instead of autistic people being these unpleasant and odious characters that need to be sent away, the stereotype is that we are some sort of high priests that live on a mountain that can move things with our minds. Or something.
And I think part of the “positive stereotyping” is the idea that Einstein, or sometimes it’s someone like Newton is stated to be an example, was autistic. Such as in this article:
I should note that the articles I quote use the term “Asperger’s Syndrome.” I wrote about why I don’t apply that term to myself, despite that being my official diagnosis, here:
I should also note that the article contains the sentence: “Elliott adds that Einstein had a good sense of humour, a trait that is virtually unknown in people with severe Asperger syndrome.” Yikes! I think Elliott may have had another condition, and that condition is called never having met someone with “severe Asperger syndrome”!
This article also talks about the possibility of Einstein being autistic:
I should note that this article contains the sentence: Einstein’s biographer “Walter Isaacson argues against these speculations, pointing out that Einstein’s romantic interests and spirited interactions with people showed an empathetic relationship with others.” Yikes! Einstein probably wasn’t autistic because he like talked to people and stuff. I guess that means most people I thought were autistic aren’t then!
So, this is something that pops up as an item of discourse every few years or so. Was Einstein able to like invent gravity or whatever because he was autistic? My argument is, we’ll never know for sure if he was autistic.
Einstein wasn’t diagnosed as autistic. And while I accept self diagnosis and I think other people should too, Einstein did not identify as autistic. So as far as I’m concerned, that puts Einstein firmly in the “inconclusive” category for autism, as is the case for many people throughout history. And to be fair, the articles I talked about did acknowledge how we can’t ever know for sure. But, the main argument I’m making, is that, whether he was autistic or not, simply does not matter. It does not explain how he was able to revolutionize science the way he did.
But, some might say, isn’t it plausible that he was autistic? Doesn’t it explain how he was able to come up with the Theory of Relativity?
No. It Doesn’t.
How many autistic people do you know that have come up with new ideas that have revolutionized science? How many autistic people do you know that have come up with ideas that have fundamentally changed humanity? How many autistic people do you know that are even known world wide for what they have done?
And if your answer is that you can name loads, I don’t mean famous autistic people. I’m talking about how many autistic people do you know, in your personal life, who have changed the world?
I bet the answer is few, if any.
And this isn’t to bash autistic people. The same is true of neurotypical people. Few if any of the neurotypical people in your life will have done anything to change the world. Most people, whether autistic, neurotypical, dyslexic, or people of any neurotype whatsoever, do not do anything that fundamentally changes the world. And that’s fine, you don’t need to do that to live a life worth living.
So what’s my point?
Let’s say I grant that Einstein was autistic. Does autism explain how he was able to make world changing scientific discoveries? No. If it did explain it, then, every autistic person you know in your personal life, or the vast majority of them anyway, would be making world changing discoveries. The autistic guy you encounter in the supermarket would have invented nuclear fusion. The autistic woman you meet at the bus stop sometimes would have invented a cure for asthma. The autistic enby you meet up with in town every now and then would have invented faster than light travel.
If autism explains what Einstein did, then, you’d know a lot more autistic people who had made world changing discoveries.
This isn’t to say Einstein wasn’t autistic. I don’t know if he was and that’s not the argument I’m making. What I am saying is that, if he was autistic, it’s completely incidental to how he was able to do what he did.
Einstein’s brain, whether through genetics, or environment, or both, would have had to in many ways be very different from both an autistic person’s brain and a neurotypical person’s brain.
This leads me to another thought, which is, how do we know that because of various negative factors in our lives, such as poor education, how do we know it’s not the case that the vast majority of us could achieve so much more in our lives if we were in the right circumstances from a young age?
Well, that still means Einstein’s brain had unique qualities possessed by neither autistic or neurotypical people, because he was able to make massive scientific discoveries despite the limitations of his environment. If most of humanity throughout history has been held back by factors such as poor educational opportunities, then Einstein was still unique, because he was able to succeed despite poor educational opportunities.
But, there is a quite nasty side to this particular positive stereotyping. And that is.
This Brand of Positive Stereotyping Isn’t Even Applied To All Autistic People
So saying all autistic people have these mythical amazing qualities blah blah blah is problematic, extremely problematic, in and of itself. Saying something positive, but untrue, about an entire group of people, is a serious problem.
But it’s worse than that. Because what’s been said is, only SOME autistic people are amazing and wonderful and have mathematical equations and scientific theories growing out of their ears.
Only some autistic people deserve to be considered amazing and wonderful and wonderful and amazing. For example, the Psychology Today article I mentioned earlier contains this sentence: “Did Einstein have some traits of Asperger’s Syndrome, also viewed as a high-functioning segment of the autistic spectrum?”
The term high functioning is a term rejected by many in the autistic community. I’ve written about that here:
The terms high functioning and low functioning are extremely ableist terms. They reduce autistic people to the “high functioning” autistic people, who are so “normal” that they deserve to be part of society, and “low functioning” whose autistic personality traits are so pronounced that they just deserve to be like, sent to the naughty step or some such.
So, the argument is worse than all autistic people are cartoonishly amazing. It’s, SOME autistic people are cartoonishly amazing, and forget about the other autistic people, OOOOH THEY’RE ICKY!!!!!
So what it boils down to is, autism is sometimes, but not usually, an amazing condition that causes a person to do wonderful things! Einstein and Newton may have done what they did through the amazing power of autism! In some cases, though not usually, autism is AMAZING!!!! But not usually.
So, I started this post with the intention of talking about positive stereotyping, and positive stereotyping is a bad thing. Replacing a one dimensional negative stereotype of autistic people with a one dimensional positive stereotype of autistic people does not mean that you get to see autistic people as complete human beings.
But as I read more about the topic of Einstein supposedly being autistic, I realized that, there’s more negative stereotyping to it than positive stereotyping.
Because, the argument being made was that Einstein was “one of the good ones”. He was one of those “high functioning” autistic people, as opposed to those low functioning autistic people who are bad.
So, really, the “Einstein was autistic” narrative, is actually a lot worse than I previously thought. When I started researching this narrative, I thought it was an utterly cartoonish view that all autistic people are amazing, which we are of course, but not for the reasons that this narrative says. But really what it comes down to is, “Look, we know that autistic people are useless, but just to be nice, why don’t we grant that one or two of them were amazing? So, we’ll say, eh, Einstein and Newton were autistic, okay?”
Whether Einstein was autistic or not is irrelevant to how he was able to do what he was able to do. We will never know the answer to how he was able to come up the Theory of Relatively for certain, we are probably talking about very, very unusual differences in his brain and him being the product of a fairly unusual environment. If he would have been diagnosed as autistic, or if he would have self diagnosed himself as such were he alive today, then it is still the case that Einstein’s achievements were a product of factors that do not apply to most autistic people and most neurotypical people.
And no, I don’t take it as a compliment as an autistic person that Einstein was one of the very few of us who was able to do anything with his life that was worth doing. I repeat, it is NOT a compliment!
Ponderings Of An Autist 