Autism, individuality, and the division of labor

Richard Grinker of George Washington University came and talked at Duke a couple of weeks ago as part of Autism Awareness Month. He had a very interesting and thoughful presentation on autism, mental illness, and stigma. One of the most fundamental points he made was that capitalism, to the extent that it forcibly normalizes a model in which people grow up, leave home, find a place in the global economic machine, and replicate the model in their own families -- stigmatizes those who are challenged, through no fault of their own, in so doing. Good point.

As a counter-example Grinker, an anthropologist, told the story of a kid in some African tribe who was non-verbal, probably autistic, but had a remarkable facility with understanding the sheep and getting them in and out from pasture, finding lost ones, something like that. This kid, his point was, has no place in modern, thoroughly functionalized, societies.  I get that. It rings true and, by pointing out that an modern economic construct unnecessarily stigmatizes people who don't conform, is humane and hopeful.

However, we can flip this. Thinking back to economist Ryan Avent's work (see Kindle single The Gated City) on the benefits of highly granularized division of labor and how it boosts aggregate productivity, it's easy to argue that the only way we get an anthropologist who can tell the autism story in this way is through capitalism: i.e. we need very fine-grained division of labor, high amounts of generalized economic surplus, for Roy Grinker's work to exist.

In AA yesterday I was thinking about how this phenomenon connects as well to the effacing of individuality and regionalism and the increase in homogeneity in the corporate workplace. There is a tendency amongst the cultural elite to decry this cultural flattening. But the fact of the matter is, that to have people on far-flung teams working together, they have to be able to work together on things like conference calls, which means their language must be more or less interoperable. And they must be expected to behave more or less the same way. You can't have people being perceived to undercut and diss one another in emails, text threads, conference calls etc. because they have different dialects, intonational patterns, and in jokes. Team players have to gravitate towards a center, more or less, to be able to work together and get the benefits of working in a corporation (so you don't have to hunt down specialized vendors and service providers every time you need one - which takes time. This was the essential insight of Ronald Coase into the nature of firms: see this thumbnail). It is sad that individuality suffers. People need to reclaim that for themselves.

As in so many things, there is a need for balance between the One and the Many, and lord knows it's complicated.