Circumcise your heart
When I was in Year 11, I reduced one of my teachers to tears. Mrs Kelly was telling me to get down from a balcony. As it happens, another teacher had asked me to stand there and help with something, so I explained to Mrs Kelly that I was going to stay and finish helping. We had a bit of a back-and-forth, but ultimately she got tired of debating with a 14-year-old schoolboy and shouted: “You can come down now, or you can have a detention.”
I leaned over the parapet and asked: “When would be convenient for you?” – at which Mrs Kelly burst into tears and cried out: “You don’t say, ‘When would be convenient for you?’ You say ‘Sorry!’”
School discipline requires the target to be responsive in some measure to pressure or shame. If the target is insusceptible, ticking-off just doesn’t work. For better or for worse, in my case I’ve never been responsive to pressure or shame. I don’t think I’ve ever been successfully told off. My teachers’ admonishments just bounced off me.
Poor Mrs Kelly.
I didn’t know, during my schooldays, that I was autistic, but looking back, it’s kind of obvious. It’s actually somewhat shocking that not a single person picked it up.
No one really knows what autism is, but one theory is that it involves ‘social motivation deficits’.
In 2012, Dr Coralie Chevallier did an experiment in which she asked 36 boys to give a set of pictures a score on a scale of 1-7. They were then introduced to the person who drew each picture and asked to score it again in front of the artist. Neurotypical boys gave higher marks the second time round. Autistic boys stuck to their original conclusions.
From this and other studies, Chevallier concluded that autistic people are less likely to engage in flattery in order to climb the social ladder; less likely to “present themselves strategically in order to convince a specific audience”; and generally less likely to care what people think of them.
Indeed, as far back as 1943, when autism was first being identified, Dr Leo Kanner described one of his earliest patients as having an abnormal lack of “desire to please her teacher”.
There have been frustrated Mrs Kellys throughout history!
In this week’s parashah, Moses gives the Israelites a somewhat mysterious instruction: וּמַלְתֶּם אֵת עׇרְלַת לְבַבְכֶם, circumcise the foreskin of your heart.
It appears in a run of verses about the importance of obeying God and not rebelling, so the 19th-century commentator Malbim says that this figurative part of our hearts is the characteristic which means that “even at the time when we understand the truth, we nonetheless stiffen our necks against God”.
This is a very wise insight but it needs a little unpacking. Why would someone who knows the right thing to do nevertheless take a deliberate and informed decision to do the wrong thing?
Deuteronomy’s metaphor – metaforeskin – seems to me like quite a good summary of what overactive social motivation can do.
Most people who do wrong, in the sense meant by Moses, know perfectly well that what they’re doing is wrong. But their moral intuition is overridden by their interest in pursuing power (naming no politicians), glamour (naming no former princes) or money (naming no directors of privatised water companies). Others may not actively perpetrate injustices but they turn a blind eye because they don’t want to rock the boat and fracture the relationships on which their public image is built.
Something in human nature prompts us – the most intelligent, technologically and emotionally developed species ever to walk the earth – to do stupid things that we know to be immoral. Malbim says that that ‘something’ is the heart’s figurative foreskin. Only by circumcising our hearts, by penetrating the layers of self-indulgence that prevent our heartfelt instinct for good from reaching the surface, can we live up to God’s vision for us.
Of course, lacking social motivation isn’t always an indicator of moral purity. The boys who merrily slagged off pictures in front of the artist who drew them weren’t righting a wrong. And although Mrs Kelly’s attempt to punish me for doing what another teacher had asked wasn’t fair, it also wasn’t exactly the scandal of the century. Social motivation is important in many ways: friendships, marriages, telling a bride that she looks beautiful.
Yet autistic people’s lack of social motivation also makes us good whistleblowers, bold activists and willing members of countercultures.
So I’m going to disagree with Dr Chevallier’s framing of autism as comprising social motivation ‘deficits’. A deficit implies a failing or a shortfall.
Maybe, in fact, neurodiversity just represents people whose hearts are on the way to being circumcised.