November 29, 2005 12:46 am
Mere Autism
In 1952 English author C.S. Lewis wrote a book titled “Mere Christianity”. The meaning of the word mere, as used in the title, is very powerful although it is now somewhat obsolete. Lewis used mere to mean ‘pure‘ or more descriptively ‘what is left when all the unimportant things are stripped away‘. His book made the point that Christian faiths have a lot more in common than their differences and that those differences aren’t about things that are essential to Christianity anyway.
I found myself continuing to return to the meaning of the word mere as used by Lewis as I read the flury of blog postings and comments by other parents this weekend. There is a lot of passion in this group and sometimes there’s lot of energy going into things that aren’t related to our primary passion: helping our autistic children. So, in the spirit of C.S. Lewis, I offer the following description of Mere Autism as a potential common ground.
- A lot of people have autism / are autistic.
- We’re diagnosing autism a lot more than we used to. We have multiple theories about why but we haven’t been able to agree on one or more of them.
- Autism impacts communication, social interaction, and behaviors. The way that autism impacts an individual varies greatly from one autistic person to another. We don’t understand why.
- There seems to be both genetic and environmental factors influencing or causing autism.
- Parents take a wide variety approaches to raising and nurturing an autistic child just as parents have differing approaches to raising any child. Furthermore, similar approaches have different results with different autistic children.
- When taken collectively, the differences among autistic indivduals, the complexity of human genetics, the potential variation and impact of multiple environmental factors, the differences in approaches taken by parents, and the variety of outcomes, autism is an incredibly complex topic.
With that I’ll step off my little electronic soapbox. :^)
Amen Shaun – that sounds like a nice world to live in.
November 29th, 2005 at 4:05 am
Many of us who disagree on so many things are still seeking to find common ground. Thanks for helping us focus on that.
November 29th, 2005 at 3:25 pm
Sounds like a title for an autism blog!
Living with autism (in autismland, as I like to say), is to inhabit a space of “what is left when all the unimportant things are stripped away.”
And it is a richly hued world, indeed.
December 1st, 2005 at 11:59 pm
If only the Internet had more “little electronic soapboxes” that discussed autism in such a calm tone and nonjudgmental terms!
Thank you for posting this.
December 5th, 2005 at 10:23 am