When you can't kiss it better
Charlotte Moore on how to understand, and draw wisdom from, autistic children The Beslan massacre didn't bring out the best in me. Beneath my revulsion and outrage lay a baser emotion, a cowardly
dread of having to deal with the reaction of my six-year-old son. If you were to describe Jake politely you would call him a sensitive child. He's afraid of kidnappers, slave traders, heart attacks, press gangs, spiders, Wallace and Gromit, and the dark. Now, he fears that Sedlescombe C of E primary school, where he is in Year 2, will be taken over by terrorists.
I want to allay Jake's fears, partly because I don't want him to suffer, but also for selfish reasons. When he's gripped by anxiety he won't go upstairs alone, calls out constantly at bedtime, and wakes me to relate his had dreams. It's all quite tedious. I tell him that what happened in Beslan is very, very unlikely to happen in East Sussex, but I'm uneasy — I believe what I'm saying, but it seems heartless, implying, 'We can feel cosy and safe while other people suffer.' How else can I reassure him?
Well, there's always God. I'm agnostic, but it's amazing how useful God becomes when you need to answer a child's questions. Jake is a believer, and I don't want to rock his faith. When his head teacher led the school in prayers halfway through the siege I was all for it. Thirty-one hostages were released, and Jake was jubilant — 'Our prayers worked!' But then, the next day . . . 'Mum,' asked Jake, is there any difference between prayers and luck?'
Jake's questions and worries may be hard to deal with, but deep down I welcome them. They're normal. They're part of the process that will turn him into a morally responsible adult, a man with a conscience, someone who cares about what happens beyond his immediate circle. I have two other sons, older than Jake, and they have asked no questions about Beslan or about any other public event. They sat, impassive, beside me while I watched the news from Russia. If Jake had been there I would have changed channels, but the horrors had no effect on George and Sam. My older sons are both autistic. George has a reduced capacity for empathy, Sam none at all. I'm not even sure that they can identify the emotions on the mourners' faces — sorrow, anger, despair all pass them by. Autism derives from the Greek word for the self. It's an unsatisfactory term, because an autist's sense of self is almost as rudimentary as his sense of other people. Neurotypical people, like me, understand ourselves at least partly in terms of how others see us. When we are selfish, we are choosing to place our desires above those of other people. Autists cannot he truly selfish, because they don't fully understand that other people have desires. This isn't a question of functional intelligence. Uniquely, autism is primarily a social, not an intellectual, handicap. Autists lack a 'theory of mind"; they cannot put themselves into another's position. They're not wholly aware that other people's experiences are different from their own.
My sons know who they are and what they like and dislike. They have a powerful sense of their physical selves. Sam, in particular, lives through his senses. He exists in the here and now; he has no sense of past or future, and doesn't put himself into any kind of context. He doesn't see himself as a member of a family, as a 12year-old, as an English boy — maybe not even as a boy at all. His language is concrete, practical. He could look at a Russian hostage and, if asked, could say 'He's crying', hut 'He's sad' would be beyond his scope.
George has a better social understanding, and his speech, which is quite fluent, contains more abstract ideas than Sam's.
At 14, George has at last started to ask questions — 'Is naughty the same as exhausted?' he asked this morning. He minds when people and animals die, but only those known to him. Russian children on television are considerably less real to him than the characters in his beloved videos, The Wind in the Willows or Kipper the Dog.
When autistic children hurt themselves, they don't seek comfort, 'Kiss it better' has no effect; they lack the instinct that leads the rest of us to turn to other human beings for solace and support. In the same way, my boys don't turn to God as a way of navigating life's difficulties. The core of a child's religious faith is the need to feel protected by a stronger being; Jake's feelings about God are akin to his feelings about me. But Leo Kanner, who first identified autism in the 1940s, describes its essence as 'extreme aloneness'. Aloneness, not loneliness; my older sons feel no need to make the kind of connections that help Jake to make sense of the world.
When Sam was (inappropriately) attending a mainstream primary school, his report simply said, 'Religious Knowledge: Not Applicable'. What are the theologically inclined to make of autists — human beings who have interests and preferences and feelings and may be possessed of high intelligence, but who are incapable of an altruistic act? Autists can be taught to follow rules; they can — with extreme difficulty in some cases — be taught to 'behave'. But moral courage, self-sacrifice, humility — these virtues are irrelevant, because they involve a comparison between self and others of which the autist is by definition incapable.
But if many virtues are inaccessible to an autist, so too are many vices. Autists don't lie, because deception is incompatible with mind-blindness. They are not covetous — or at least, they might desire their neighbour's ox (or their neighbour's lollipop) but this would be an uncomplicated and immediate desire for the ox (or lollipop) per se, undarkened by any malignant thoughts about the neighbour himself. Cheating, boasting, malice and spite — my sons arc blessedly free from all of these. Ask parents what they find appealing about their autistic child, and most will reply, 'There's an innocence. .
In his poem My Cat .leoffrey, Christopher Smart describes his cat as 'an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon'. Perhaps, From a moral or religious viewpoint, this is the best way to regard children like George and Sam. As the adults discover in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, the autist cannot adapt to them; they must try their hardest to accommodate him and, in so doing, become better and wiser people.
Charlotte Moore's book about autism, George and Sam, is published by Viking.
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