Guessing the Rulebook

I feel almost cheated that some of these conventions are going ... I don't think that 'anything' is accepted. I think you go to lots of social occasions now where there isn't an official dress code, but there is a dress code, really; people can turn up and you find yourself wearing the wrong sort of thing – you're too smart, or not smart enough, or whatever. We're going from a world where you had these rules which everyone knew and everyone could follow, to a world where you have to guess, and where the chances of your being adversely judged for wearing the wrong thing are massively magnified.

– David Mitchell, Behaving Ourselves Episode 4

It's been over ten years now that I've been listening to Radio 4. In that time it's become enmeshed with my own internal dialogue, and I've practically moved into the physical manifestation of it, so it's rare to be surprised by those moments I recall so vividly from the early days, in which I'd hear my own thoughts and feelings articulated by someone with much better rhetorical skills and diction. Yet that is precisely what happened a few times in David Mitchell's series on manners, most strongly with the above passage, which was about wearing a jacket at a golf club but could have been about any set of social norms anywhere.

Anyone my age or younger has a peculiar association with the world of social norms. We were raised by, and exist in a world curated by, people who grew up in the 60s and 70s – not necessarily those who rejected the regulated world of their parents, but who came along in the wake of those who did, and never knew that world first-hand. We are two generations removed from the word of 'manners', from a collectively agreed-upon rulebook by which we play, to keep the elbows we rub well greased. It was a world where you knew what to do, for example, when a friend lost a family member – it was also a world where you knew that they'd suffered a loss in the first place, because there were Things One Did on such an occasion that communicated this fact without the bereaved having to find the words to tell people. The world we know now has thrown out the rulebook, and as Mr Mitchell says above, this leaves us constantly at a loss.

( The Search for a Rulebook, be it Hipster or Fundamentalist )

But that's a subject for the sociologists, and no doubt they've got it well in hand. What's most preoccupied my ponderings on this subject has been a perceived rise in the prominence of Asperger's Syndrome in a generation now out of living memory of a social rulebook. Just as asexuals have been left exposed by a rampantly sexualised popular culture, where before they could be masked by the taboos everyone held, so it seems (to me at least) that Aspies are left high and dry in a society where reading behavioral cues and using them to improvise – in short, 'social guessing' – is the only way to function, and those who struggle with that are branded 'dysfunctional.' Could it be that numbers are not increasing, so much as that existing Aspies are more visible because they're short on our modern social currency?

( The Rejected Rulebook and the Aspie Disadvantage )

Fortunately I have too much work on at the moment to bore you with further explorations of this subject, but if anyone has any thoughts or observations they'd like to share, or vehement disagreements to voice, I'd love to hear it. In the meantime, David Mitchell's series is expiring from the Radio iPlayer soon, so if you're inclined to give it a listen, please do ...

Yr affc^t. sv^t.,

Tealin