This essay is about autism, so bear with me through the roundabout introduction. Disclaimer: while I make a lot of general claims about people with ASD, I can really only speak about my own experiences, and then only in confused and broken sentences.
From my freshman to my senior year in high school I was on the Scholastic Bowl team. If you are unaware of what this is, because you spent your youth doing cool stuff like playing actual sports or making out in cars, I will explain. Scholastic Bowl is a varsity competition for nerds, where two teams of four players represent their schools by being the first to buzz in and correctly answer questions posed by a moderator, quiz-show-style. It’s basically “University Challenge” from that one episode of The Young Ones. It purports to be a measure of academic knowledge, but the questions are pretty much bar trivia about the humanities and STEM.
This was a game that was basically made for teenaged John, and it’s not hyperbole to say that I pretty much carried my team: I answered around 80% of the questions and usually buzzed in early—that is, before the moderator was done reading the question. It’s not that I was smarter than my teammates, it’s that I had weirdly eclectic interests and an ability to retrieve facts from my memory with speed and precision (I have lost this skill in middle age).
For an activity that took up so much of my teen years, I recall no specific matches, but there was one question, and my answer, that I remember lucidly. It was toward the end of a match that was nearly tied, and the score was making me tense and focused. The moderator asked the toss-up, “who wrote the New World Symphony?”
I buzzed in immediately and responded, “Dvořák.”
The moderator looked confused and peered down at his question card. “Could you repeat that?” he said.
“Dvořák,” I repeated.
He examined the card a few seconds more and then said, “I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. Would the other team like to respond—”
I loudly interrupted: “Is that spelled dee vee oh, ar-with-a-caron ay-with-an-accent, kay?”
Everyone in the room was taken aback; a student reprimanding a moderator was a completely out of order. “Because that’s pronounced duhVORzyahk. It sounds like it has a Z, but it doesn’t, so you must be reading it incorrectly.”
I suddenly realized that my coaches and teammates were staring at me like I had done something wrong, so I added in a softer voice, “because it’s a Czech name…”
Strangely, while this exchange is etched in my memory, I don’t actually remember whether we got the ten points for a toss-up or not.
I tell this anecdote neither to flex about what a precocious kid I was, nor to admit that I was an incorrigible smartass (both of these are true). My point here is to illustrate the way that autistic people’s minds work. We tend not to pay attention to authority. We are very committed to the idea of truth; we are also committed to the idea of justice—these two positions are intertwined. This insistence can (and does) lead to black and white thinking about things that aren’t black and white, but it also means a belief and fealty to objective truth and fairness.
I don’t mean to imply that autistic people can’t prevaricate. There’s a popular truism that ASD renders one incapable of lying; this is ridiculous and implies that we are a fantastical race of fairy children, magically bound to speak truth. It’s more accurate to say that we aren’t willing to lie for the sake of politeness or to make someone feel better. If someone asks me how I’m doing, or if I like their haircut, I’m going to tell them, even if they really weren’t looking for a straight answer. It would feel inauthentic to do otherwise.
Likewise, an autistic heightened concern for fairness—what psychologists call justice sensitivity—is also tied to our sense of integrity. Good faith and equal treatment matter a lot. At its best, justice sensitivity motivates care for others and the questioning of social conventions. However, it can also lead to a rigid and judgmental outlook, and when this is paired with an indifference towards hierarchy, the outcome is know-it-all punks like me ill-advisedly sassing the very people who give out the points.
But, to be fair, the New World Symphony really was written by Dvořák.
