The other night, a friend of mine jokingly remarked that “autism is the new chipotle!” The remark wasn’t a slam on people with what’s referred as autism, so much as it was a comment on the strange word fads which suddenly seem to catch on in popular media and common street language.

Chipotle. Acai. Words you never noticed before suddenly springing to life, catching national attention. Happens with celebrity diets which always have unique names: Atkins, Zone, South Beach Diet, etc. You’re seeing it begin now with words like “green” and “sustainable” as add-ons to the older terminology of “organic” and “recycled” and “post-consumer waste.”

It’s the name-game. It’s punning and rhyming. It’s crossword puzzles. It’s Orwell’s NewSpeak. It’s catchy phrases, sayings and jingles. It’s poetry and computer code of the best and worst kind. And it’s something which people who have a particular neuro-chemical profile and appropriate environmental support for expression of those traits are quite good at naturally. Some people call it a gift.

Autism, while suddenly trendy in the marketplace of language as a buzzword, isn’t some new fad, trendy fruit or vegetable, or fake celebrity diet. Autism is considered, on Wikipedia, as a brain development disorder. Milder forms of autism, referred to as autism spectrum disorders, like Asperger’s have been receiving increased notice over the past few years; I’ve at least been tracking that theme for a while. One of the big original mentions I remember seeing of Asperger’s floating out on the language flotsam of the adwebs back in the day was an article published by Wired magazine about Asperger’s. I could link to the article directly, but you can find it. I think the gist of it was that Silicon Valley (don’t hear that one too much anymore, do ya?) technology companies are starting to have to cover autism spectrum disorders on some insurance plans because the frequency of ASD’s with nerd-on-nerd genetic pairings among employees (ie, nerds tend to mate with other nerds and produce even nerdier offspring). So this means somebody was losing money somewhere.

And this is why things like autism spectrum disorders are a big deal. First of all, you know it’s something, because the buzzword/keyword meme-buster cluster “autism spectrum disorder” has a value-judgement built right into the statement: disorder. It’s wrong: it’s dis-against order. It’s chaotic and negative. Companies don’t want to have to increase incredibly costly and mostly un-charted waters of “treating” autistic children. Most old-fashioned (wouldn’t work for Silicon Alley tech companies wanting to look stylish) approaches to autism and neuro-genetic spectrum variations were nothing short of barbaric until most of recent history, and in some cases continues even today.

What works best for corporations seeking predictable profits (not just talking about insurance here) is to have predictable consumer behavior upon which to make profit-models. This means you know what everybody is going to do: this works because you are constantly telling people what to think in public relations networks that stretch from here to infinity. Predictable humaniculture means that all of your crops are going to come out basically the same. It’s mostly a mono-culture running these days, unless you start breaking it down on other types of scales.

Which is why I think Jonathan Mitchell is so interesting. Jonathan Mitchell is a self-identified autism spectrum disorder sufferer, who I first heard on NPR one afternoon many years ago. He did some readings of his short stories and a novel he was working on at the time, and there was some interview audio with him which I adored. Jonathan’s writing was some of the most refreshingly honest and direct writing I’d heard in a long time, and I immediately identified with the emotional depth of experience beneath it. I looked Jonathan up online, found an AOL email address for him and struck up a dialogue with him. Since I liked his work so much, I offered to build him a website to present a more public face to his writings. He’s since taken over full-time as his site’s webmaster, which is cool, and has set up a blogspot account to further explore autism research and portrayal in the media.

He writes a lot about neurodiversity, which is something I’m really interested in, along with it’s closest cousin: cognitive liberty. As a first-hand sufferer of Asperger’s, Jonathan often comments on perceived flaws in perspective on the part of neurodiversity’s advocates. In a recent post, he wrote:

Proponents of neurodiversity cling to the flawed notion that autistics need acceptance and not cure and that if society would only change to accommodate autistics, autism would not be a problem. The autism is still there and no problems are solved by this philosophy.

I guess my perspective on the whole subject goes back to monoculture versus polyculture. In a monoculture, you grow a big bunch of the same kind of thing. Like potatoes. This means you can save money on supplies by using all the same stuff since they all grow under identical conditions. But the problem from an economic perspective and crop vitality perspective is that if a flaw enters the strain: a rogue modified gene, a new pest variant, then your whole crop fails. But in a farming system based on polyculture, you’re going to be growing lots of different kinds of potatoes, each of which has its own uniquely weird ideal conditions to grow under {cribbed loosely from Michael Pollan}. So just from the standpoint of pure survival, your crops as a whole are going to be more resilient because they are more varied - but the labor and other costs may be added because you have multiple small patches of one sub-type, versus one huge swath of land.

Neurodiversity, then, to me is the same sorta thing. Do we want all humans to be basically the same, with a gigantic globe-spanning culture and basic genotype pattern (possibly trademarked?), or do we want to cultivate lots of different “right” ways of what it means to be a human being: some strange combination of animal vegetable and space creature? I don’t know what it is that we “are” metaphysically, but I know it requires all of us. We’ve got to be pro-everyone. I think that just means helping whoever and being nice to everybody, no questions asked. Hard way to live sometimes, but I think it’s what we need more than anything.

I wonder where the sudden chipotle-style autism-keyword media craze suddenly came from. What causes something like that to suddenly turn into a mainstream topic? I’m not naive enough to believe it just randomly happens. Where is it going? Controversy over the Terri Schiavo case touched on some of these issues from a totally different angle a few years ago: what does it mean to be the perfect fully-functional human being, and what do we do with people who don’t match those ideals? Portrayal of human physical characteristics and behaviors within the media encourage us to self-select certain types of genes and their phenotypic expression out of existence by preventing mating behaviors using imprinted social taboos. Robert Anton Wilson talked about that kind of thing a bit. But he used this language about circuits and imprinting around circuits. Imprinting around open circuits means, I think, that you have these basic open patterns in the human experience: mostly focused around functioning of human organs and endocrine patterns. As you age, the functioning of these organs becomes associated ritualistically with certain socially-acceptable and socially-unacceptable (a dividing line is drawn) ways of being, acting, thinking, feeling & perceiving. Imprints become basically subconscious limiters or governors of human behaviors. You mostly can’t see them because that part of your brain which perceives experiences consciously wasn’t formed in the way that it is now that you’re reading this…

For the human species to not just survive, but to thrive and to continue to create and to celebrate life, I hope we’ll see a broadening instead of a lessening of the terms and conditions of what it means to be a human being. Throwing open those doors means we may find ourselves in a weird place several years down the road when we bump into things like artificial intelligences and sentient non-human energetic entities. Will we give those things human rights? Will we take away other types of people’s rights because they look and act too different from us? What about when you can sit down and select any kinds of genes you wants your kids to have, like a smorgasbord, or like notes on a keyboard. Play those genes baby, tickle them ivories. Words are what we pass down from generation to generation: genetic code words, chemically-spoken histories of what came before us and why it was important. What’s more interesting and real to pass on as a genetic & memetic legacy to our ancestors, whoever they may be: a digitally white-washed version of what happened, or the version with all the hissing and crackling, hiccuping and scratching?

There’s no one person on this earth who is the perfect or ideal person. He or she doesn’t exist. There are an infinite number of ways you can be a person, an infinite number of variations. They all have their consequences both positively and negatively from an experiential standpoint. Most behavior ends up being essentially really pragmatic. You do x because y will happen if you don’t; it’s observable. There’s a right way to live life, because people seem to enjoy it more. Maybe that’s what we should base studies of human behavior and genetic variation on: who’s enjoying it more, who’s living it most fully? Whatever your neurotype, the subject of the “good life” has been the Holy Grail of philosophers for generations. What is the good life? By defining it, come to live it. Don’t get lost in the chipotle-meatloafs thrown at you from passersby with peculiar undisclosed agendas.