A typical comment made on Reddit social media about autism and empathy that I responded to;
Another person wrote:
What I love about the Damian Milton/Luke Beardon ideas about empathy is, non-autistics have had a monopoly on saying "we're so empathetic, autistic people aren't empathetic at all," when it's actually more like "all neurotypes struggle to understand people not in their neurotype"
My (Stephen Gutknecht) response to this:
I am intending to add additional information in context. My emphasis:
Empathy being too strong in autism has been published wide since 2009: https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-radical-new-autism-theory but there is always a huge amount of poor information associated with autism. Like "vaccination causes autism".
"empathy" is a term the autism community loves to use, but there is another word "compassion" out there that the autism community avoids. And it's a very common word in Church, Mosque, Synagogue, Temple, etc.
when it's actually more like "all neurotypes struggle to understand people not in their neurotype"
A study of media environments "media ecology" shows the same patterns. People in USA who watch Fox News do not understand people who read newspapers. Neil Postman is probably the best teacher on this, but there are others such as Howard Bloom and Peter Pomerantsev. I think it is a fundamental mistake of modern society to ignore what Peter Pomerantsev, Howard Bloom and Neil Postman are pointing out. As there is a tendacy to ignore that learning and language comes from media. This article by Megan Garber: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/fox-news-trump-language-stelter-hoax/616309/
Even TikTok users vs. Reddit users, and even down to subreddit users who consider other subreddits out-groups.
Other person wrote:
when it's actually more like "all neurotypes struggle to understand people not in their neurotype"
The field of Comparative Mythology shows people raised in one religion can have serious problems understanding people raised on another religion. People tend to associate it with race, but adoptions across the world shows examples like that a white USA child of 15 days old adopted and raised by a family in India with Hindu religion is going to have similar behavior from the mythology / religion. Right now in the Middle East you have two systems of relation battling it out since October 7, 2023.
There is also how wealthy people treat those in poverty, how people don't connect to each other, etc. To interpret empathy and compassion lines with too much tree focus on autism can miss the humanity forest issues.
All these issues of compassion vs. empathy, religion vs. religion, culture vs. culture - converge in the works of James Joyce, notably Finnegans Wake. Which several teachers have based their work on. It's a dense and complex work - but confronts the "Tower of Babel" metaphor problem at the deepest level of the human brain. Marshall McLuhan and Joseph Campbell based their work on Joyce's work.
reminder: the subreddit is named "Autism Translation", and I'm doing just that.