We Senior Aspies have a paramount duty to young Aspies who have just set out on Life's journey in a manifestly evil world. When I left school in 1960 I admit that I was still emotionally a schoolboy until my mid twenties. I did NOT fall prey to charlatans as have so many young people today thanks to the lifeskills I learned at Red Hill Remideial School which decisively moulded my character in a quite unexpected way. Today a young person is readily drawn into gambling, binge drnking, indebtedness, drugtaking, and violence. Young Aspies are naive and gullible; so very much at risk from people with thoroughly ulterior motives who see them as soft targets - easily exploited. MORAL ARMAMENT of the kind I had learned at Red Hill Schiool enables young Aspies to see through deceptions and adopt measures to thwart the nefarious goals of people with evil inclinations.
Our duty to young Aspies is to provide them with this MORAL ARMAMENT. Our goals must always be kept in mind; our proteges deserve rewarding careers, happy marriages, the joy of parenthood, friendships and widening horizons that come about by the development of all their latent abilities.
(Important: Do not confuse Moral Armament with MORAL REARMAMENT a religious movement founded by a German that flourished for about 40 years and is now quite moribund).
Despite our Aspergerisms and ingrained autonomous relexes that give rise to distressing behaviours, we can overcome these Aspergerisms by acceptance, understanding and the lifelong exercise of STERN WILLPOWER. So each is destined in his own right way, an exemplary life to display (Q.v. below: "Exemplary Life Movement") We have apparently intractable problems to solve. The young Aspie who sees through the shallowness of modern society may well retreat into his private obsessionalisms and become totally isolated in what amounts to a private fantasy world. This is no less damaging than being corrupted by his peers and so acquiring a criminal record. IF Senior Aspies befriend such vulnerable young people it is OUR DUTY to provide them with a varied menu of life-affirming pursuits and training in vocationally related lifeskills.
We need a better Code of Behaviour than traditional morality.
Traditional Judaeo-Christian morality is very much a packhorse bridge truly collapsed under the traffic of modern wrongdoing. This morality was satisfactory for a quite primitive agricultural society. Its prohibitions are no longer appropriate to our world. Hence it is rightly rejected. But as the French philosopher Durkheim observed a century ago:
"the central problem of every civilisation is the restraint of greed" and
"those most in need of morality are those most likely to reject it"
I owe my late, devoutly Christian father an enormous backhanded compliment following his fatuous fulminations during a row about religion in 1967. This spurred me to construct a Rational Code of Human Conduct thjat made God redundant, that came to be known as Contributionism. As 1967 was the year of the Gay News blasphemy trial I feared that I would be charged with blasphemy if I was found to be the author. So I invented a myth that it was the work of a schoolpal called Alan Wright, and this mythology has given rise to my greatest achievement in life, my trilogy of novels about Alan Wright, a.k.a. The Socrates of Charford (q.v. Appendix)
Functional and Dysfunctional Prohibitions
Orthodox Judaism lives in the past and its practitioners share a corporate obsessional compulsive disorder. It has failed to come to terms with science and the need for society to operate continuously day and night. Never more so than the Sabbatarian restrictions. A reliable source told me about an Orthodox Jew who alighted in a tiny Shropshire town just before dusk on a Friday in December because his religion FORBADE HIM TO USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT after dusk on Fridays and the train was delayed. He is said to have made a thorough nuisance of himself and eventually was taken willy nilly by police car to Shrewsbury! He lacked the intelligence to realise that no harm could come to him by travelling by train after dark on a Friday!
All those dogmatic religious people whom I have ever suffered were those who lacked the intelligence to cope with the world as we find it. That included my late parents, for whom, the correct wine to serve with roast beef was far more important than my schoolwork. I have yet to meet Christians who understand the elementary general science I had mastered even at age 12. All too often I meet Christians who are dangerously incompetent at such matters as using electricity. At Red Hill School, boys were encouraged to find out for themselves so I read science textbooks. Ar age 12 I had understood the principles of flight so well as to design and build a small model aircraft with swept back wings like the then state of the art Hawker Hunter fighter. My father sternly frowned upon my scientific hobbies particularly model railways. It was through model railways that I decisively overcame one major Asperger handicap - clumsiness with hands, and absorbed far more applied maths than I learned in school. Today however Christians in the Blair government are bent on prohibiting all those life affirming pursuits which form good character in young people.
YET self-destructive behaviours are tacitly condoned indeed encouraged (e.g. by the extension of licensing hours).
I have coined the word GRICEHOOD from the German GREIS, stupid old man, to denote a state of self-inflicted stupefaction. Our society is GRICEBOUND, incapable of rising out of this stupefaction. Advertisers GRICE (maliciously stupefy) the public.
What grices, diminishes people, and is evil. A rational code of behaviour would prohibit anything that diminishes anybody in any way. So to a total ban on smoking, gambling, and the consumption of substances which impair mental or physical functioning. It would however encourage every possible kind of life-affirming, mentally expanding activity. The outcome would be a society of polymaths such as I describe in my novella WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET (q.v.).
Moral watertightness is expected of Mentors.
All in a fellowship of Mentors have to struggle to live exemplary lives and abstain from any behaviours that diminish themselves or anyboidy else. They must therefore be teetotal non smokers who do not gamble, do not get into debt and do not over eat. Yet they can be excused minor peccadilloes which can be the vices of their virtues. It would be inconsistent of a Mentor for example to jump on anybody with bad handwriting if he wrote with an illegible scrawl. But Mentors can be excused such traits as parsimony, untidiness and scatterbrainedness.
Young Aspies at risk of psychotic breakdown if rejected by their peers.
We Senior Aspies must reach into the hurt minds of such people and gently guide them into as wide a range of wholesome challenging intelligence-enhacing pursuits as possible. Othersise as they are rejected by their peers they will be locked into their own private fantasy-worlds and never acquire either the lifeskills or the motivation to hold down jobs, still less find partners and ultimately when their partners die they will be totally incapable of fending for themselves.
Conflict with Religious Fundamentalists.
Aspies from Muslim, Catholic or fundamentalist Christian homes need very special care. There is a likelihood of a head on clash with paretns or siblings and priests because AS is seen as a besetting moral failing to be extirpated by cruel and ineffective "treatment". The client needs to be taken away from the damaging home environment and transplanted into a community where his latent abilities are drawn out (e.g. by taking up challenging outdoor activities). So to redefining himself in terms of his new found prowess and so to a convulsive paradigm shift, a penetrating change of attitudes, values and behaviour. Then (as I portray my characters in my Socrates of Charford scripts) the young person finds a partner and lives happily ever after in the felowsip of insightful people. However (as I have portrayed in a few of my scripts) it is likely that the young person will abruptly and painfully regress to his former self when in the company of culprit kinspeople. Then the young person needs a Mentor and Guide of the calibre of Alan Wright who always scorches the culprit kinspeople with righteous wrath. Aspies from fundamentalist backgrounds desperately need champions of the downtrodden, of the calibre of Alan Wright.
Conflict with "Mammonism"
The young Aspie has to live in a society bent on self-destruction. I am one of many who foresee the imminent breakdown of civilisation. Accordingly I have described a Successor-civilisation in my novella WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET. Here American businessman Lincoln Steen has a severely emotionally disturbed son who will not talk. He flies to "Avalonshire" in south Wales to observe Alan Wright's Contributionist civilisation - a society of polymaths whose only passion is to share the fruits of their self-createdness with their neighbours and Distinguished Foreign Visitors. Alan Wright agrees to treat Steen's son and his son moves to Avalonshire to flourish ever after. The basis of this civilisation is moral deveopment to Alan's own lofty level. This is quite independent of any pre-existent religious teaching but its ethics are congruent with those of Judaism, Nonconformist Christianity and to a certain extent, Buddhism. Masefield's poens SEEKERS and A CREED synerae to form much of Contributionst theology so that the fictitious Welsh city of Romanbridge becomes the "City of God, where Radiant people meet" in SEEKERS, whilst A CREED's Reincarnationist Strict Consequentialism is a more certain moral sheet anchor than any Christian prohibitionisms. So I portray a society where people with distressing peculiarities of every possible kind redefine themselves by their Contributions to the Common Good; and paramountly their practice of the Higher Loves.
"Love" is an utterly devalued word.
I replace it with the Greek words AGAPE, CARITAS and DELPHILY.
AGAPE is the general duty to care for the planet in every possible way.
CARITAS is the universl obligation of every adult to one another - "good Samaritanism".
DELPHILY is the highest of loves; care for someone as a Vessel of God, Willingness to make sacrifices for that person and in the ultimate resort, the duty to take such steps as are necessary to prevent a self-harming loved person from further harm. That may sadly include "sectioning".
Can we Aspies initiate a life-affirmation movement that might yet save Earth from Mankind?
There is NO active influential life-affirmation movement comparable to the Temperance Movement of a century ago. This was backed by the Nonconformist Churches and Scottish Presbyterianism. It provided wholesome pursuits for vulnerable young people and even operated an alcohol-free paddle steamer that took poor Glaswegians to fabulous distant places like Kilcreggan!
I put it to ELAS and PHAD and the Glasgow Autistic Centre.
I am now 64 years old and I have a paramount duty to pass on all my lifeskills, expereince, knowledge, insights and supremely my values to young Aspies before I die, so that they shall develop all their latent faculties and pursue careers, enjoy happy marriages, parenthood, friendships, widening horzons, fulfilment despite what we must all come to terms with. And so become what I term CARYATIDS after the statues in the Erectheum on the Acropolis - people who by their exemplary lives affirm the God Within Themselves and form the moral engine of society. So giving rise to that indefinitely sustainable society I describe in WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET. Accordingly I seek FEEDBACK from this Account and the next stage will be to draw up a programme with my commitment to give all of myself to the service of my fellow Aspies until I drop dead. Thus my life preaches my faith.
I anxiously await that Feedback from Readers of this Account.
David Seagrave, Kirkcaldy 3.1.2006
