A couple of weeks ago, I was at a party where I met a woman whose exact profession I can’t remember, but who is one of the army of modern psychological workers that treat autism. Funnily enough, it was at exactly the same friend’s house that I randomly met a virologist just a couple of years ago. Opportunities like that don’t come along very often, and I very politely and non-confrontationally asked many of the questions around the identification of viruses that I had formulated during the corona debacle. Unsurprisingly, I was very unimpressed with the answers given.
Now, I haven’t been following the autism thing anywhere near as closely as I did corona, but I was keen to ask my new conversation partner about it. My first question was the most obvious: “What exactly is autism?” Interestingly, the woman seemed uncomfortable answering. There’s no definitive definition, she said, and then proceeded to reel off a collection of possible symptoms.
For me, this was a now very familiar story. What do AIDS, covid, long covid, and autism all have in common? They all comprise a grab bag of seemingly unrelated symptoms whose only unifying factor is a name and maybe a dodgy lab test to go with it.
That might have been the main lesson I took away from the interaction, except for the fact that the conversation came during the time that I’ve been working on my analysis of the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship. That analysis had, in turn, led me back to questions around childhood, adolescence, and maturity. As a result, I saw some interesting correspondences with my reading since autism is very much a problem of childhood.
The reason why Wagner and Nietzsche are relevant here is because they represented a cohort in the 19th century that had a very different opinion on these matters, one that we can usefully contrast against the dominant paradigm that holds in our time, the one that wants to turn every problem into a “disease”.
At the heart of the philosophy of education and development that existed in the 19th century was a concept that we can call the child of nature. Wagner is relevant here because almost all of his operas are about the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and almost all of his heroes are children of nature. Siegfried in the Ring Cycle is the best example of these. He is raised in the forest by a peasant and owes his great strength to the fact that he has not been corrupted by civilisation.
This idea expressed by Wagner was a more extreme version of some of the main educational theories of the time, including those of Locke, Rousseau, and, later, the American psychologist and educator, Granville Stanley Hall.
The basic idea of these educational theories is that young children, once they are old enough to have a level of autonomy, should be left alone to learn things for themselves wherever possible. The role of the parent or educator becomes exactly that exemplified by Wotan in Wagner’s opera Siegfried, i.e., they should observe the child from a distance, making sure no harm comes to them, but not directly interfering.
In the post-Darwin era of Stanley Hall, this philosophy had taken on an interesting variation. It was believed that in childhood we re-experience the genetic history of the entire human race. But children needed to be left to themselves in order for this recapitulation to occur. Stanley Hall argued that children should be left to nature until about the age of 8, and only then should they be introduced to an education in culture. To give them a cultural education too early would lead to precociousness, early adulthood, and would stifle future development.
This basic idea was later taken to an extreme, especially by the hippies in the 60s and 70s. According to them, all of our lives should be lived “naturally”, whatever that means. Arguably, Wagner had flirted with this idea, but it was certainly not what Locke, Rousseau, or Stanley Hall had in mind. What was important to them was that childhood should be left to nature, while adolescence was always about culture.
Stanley Hall is interesting in this respect because, even as early as 1904, he could see that increasing urbanisation meant that creating the environmental conditions where children could be natural was a practical difficulty. How can children who live in the city connect with nature? It’s an underappreciated fact that the rise of modern suburbia was partly motivated by this notion of reconnecting with nature.
And that brings us neatly around to our time. We now have far more urbanisation than in Stanley Hall’s era. We have also have far more “education” that happens at younger and younger ages. We have suburban parents who are unwilling even to allow their children to walk to school. All of our social trends are in the exact opposite direction to what would have been considered desirable by any of the thinkers we have mentioned in this post.
More than that, however, these thinkers would have fully expected to see the rise of disorders like autism. Within their model of childhood development, such problems are caused by overeducating children, while preventing a connection with “nature”. The fact that disorders like autism and ADHD are primarily found in children backs up this analysis of the situation.
From the point of view of the 19th century, the rise of these disorders is the logical outcome of modern social developments. The reason we don’t hear about any of this is because these 19th century thinkers were fully well aware that these social developments didn’t come out of nowhere. They were in the interests of certain sections of society.
Nietzsche is often caricatured as a proto-fascist, but, actually, he was vehemently against the Prussian model of education, which he saw as a disaster whereby young minds were handed over to the interests of the state. Meanwhile, the Marxists were also correct that the new style of education was in the interests of capitalists, not just in the sense of vocational training to churn out useful employees, but, more recently, due to the necessity of dual-income households, which may have helped to lower wage costs for business, but have left no option for the average parent but to send their children to care facilities while they go to work.
All of this would be bad enough by itself, but we have now taken it a step further by diagnosing the children who won’t passively accept their predicament with fancy new disorders and then subjecting them to pharmaceutical interventions to shut them up. That is a level of perversity that Stanley Hall could never have dreamed of.
Wagner did have a presentiment of it, however. In the final opera of the Ring Cycle, Götterdämmerung, he has the character Hagen give child-of-nature Siegfried a potion that causes his downfall. But at least Siegfried was a grown man in the opera. If Wagner were writing the Götterdämmerung today, he’d have to make his hero a six-year-old boy, and the story would no longer be a tragedy but something more like a zombie horror.