tealin | 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.

At first I thought I had a peculiar angle on things because I grew up with a lot of Victorian and Edwardian media, so had a constant juxtaposition of that world and this, and was fairly sure, from early on, which one I preferred. But I look around me and wonder if others in my generation, who grew up on Mario Bros rather than Anne of Green Gables, don't also have that same hankering for a world where at least some things weren't up in the air. Look at that thread of hipsterdom which harks back to the pre-war years: sure, there's an aesthetic appeal, but it can't be divorced from its cultural associations, and while concerned citizens make noise about the racism and misogyny of the emulated periods, the people I've met who are actually participating in that subculture are very socially liberal, fully embrace the last 70 years' evolution in ideas about equality, and are happy for anyone to come play. It seems to stem from a desire to retrieve the baby from the bathwater, an attempt to pick up from a point of divergence and do it right this time.

This pursuit of a rulebook can be found beyond the bearded craft-beer-and-coffee crowd in Oakland and Bermondsey. The 'green' lifestyle comes with a definite rulebook; the compulsion to sort your rubbish may not feel like the obligation to dress for dinner, but it comes from the same place. Going vegan imposes boundaries on your lifestyle as concrete as any religious sect. For that matter, there seems to be some turn and return to brands of religion that offer solid structure and a sense of continuity, from the traditional forms of Anglicanism to the highly regulated daily life of conservative Islam.

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?

I hover at the boundaries of Asperger's myself, and have always been rather good, I thought, at spotting the 'tells' in others. But I recently met a man who was diagnosed late in life, and I would never ever have guessed he was on the spectrum. It made me wonder whether the social world of a child born sixty-odd years ago was so much different from today that an Aspie could be folded in without a second thought, and equipped with the sort of rules that one nowadays has to pick up by social guessing. One of the hallmarks of the Asperger's experience is having to learn rules of behaviour consciously, which others seem to pick up unconsciously. If you live in a society where everyone is explicitly taught manners in childhood as a matter of course, this isn't a learning gap anymore, and once you've got your foot in the social door by knowing how to greet people, how to dress for which occasion, etc., you can set about learning the rest by observation and occasional instruction or correction. Take away these footholds, and social immersion becomes too daunting, and those who most need to learn remove themselves from the opportunities to do so. A child segregated into a world populated mainly by other children, as our modern education system has it, removes them from the mixed company in which they could learn adult rules of behaviour; when the adults a child does meet have little or no truck with the rulebook, and won't or can't explicitly state what is expected of someone, they are further denied, and the game of "passing" becomes that much harder to win.

It's something of a pastime for some people to diagnose Asperger's in historical figures, a game which is fraught with unknowables, as other people love to point out. Perhaps part of the problem is that these people existed in social contexts which didn't throw their difference into such high relief. If someone could play by the agreed rules, then their eccentricities would be a sideshow, not cause for thinking them fundamentally "other." It makes me wonder if modern-day levels of Asperger's diagnosis is higher in places with more relaxed (i.e. more guess-based) social codes. If it were possible to even out other factors, would we find more Aspies being diagnosed in chillaxed California than in a protocol-conscious place like Japan?

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