The Problem of the Individual

The second of three examinations of Jesus teachings in Luke 15 & 16

This is the second in a series of three essays on Jesus’ teachings on belonging in Luke 15 & 16. Read part one for the full context, and see the following post for the conclusion.

There is a phrase that has become increasingly common among certain affinity groups rooted in a desire to return to tradition, or solve the crisis of meaning. It has troubling implications when considered in the light of the three parables in Luke 15. It goes something like this:

“There is no such thing as an individual.”

The reason that so many people have come to this conclusion is that our modern adoption of individualism has undoubtedly led to many problems. Atomized individualism is certainly not an ideal state for humans, and it seems quite clear that powerful “individuals” have leveraged that concept to oppress great majorities of people. The “shepherd” who views himself apart from his flock is a tyrant, and when the option to take this position by hook or by crook is given to the sheep, conflict ensues.

The impulse to ostracize the “black sheep” may indeed protect the flock from bad actors. But the blindness that allows the “white sheep” to survive in the wilderness makes them unable to diagnose why the sheep is black. This is especially problematic in a time when the teachings of Jesus have already been leveraged towards tolerating genuinely dangerous people within our broader communities.

As I have frequently mentioned, this is particularly troubling for a certain population; the autistic. The World Health Organization has cited that autism affects around 1 in 100 children. Within the context of sheep, the autistic person is an individual. That is an interesting statistic, but there are many other conditions that occur in similar percentages.

Yet the very nature of Autism produces individuals. The problematic symptoms that lead to diagnosis are a deficit of social skills, an alienating problem. The etymology of the name, stemming from the Greek autos, which means self, points to an individual problem. This “selfism” is often perceived as selfishness by larger groups, leading to ostracization.

But the physiological and neurological symptoms make this problem inevitable, when its other symptoms are taken into consideration. Many people are aware that autism results in hypersensitivity to sensations. Less well known is that it often includes an inverse hyposensitivity, a deadening of sensation. Which attributes are turned up and turned down varies from person to person. We recognize those who are sensitive to sound, but we get frustrated with those who cannot pick out their name from a blur of other noises.

This means more information is often being taken in, but in wildly different patterns from a typical person. The second important difference comes from impaired, reduced, or delayed synaptic pruning. Children’s brains go through a process of synaptic overgrowth — the brain forms far more synapses than needed (a “bloom” of connections).

These connections are then pruned during late childhood and adolescence. Typically, this process removes about 50% of the connections, but autistics only lose an average of about 16%. What is removed is highly dependent on cultural context. We learn what is most important by those around us. 99% of the people will move on from noticing certain things that stuck out during their childhood. The autistic person clings to far more.

These facts explain an important discovery made by researchers using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure resting-state brain activity in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to non-autistic children.

The key finding was that autistic children’s brains generate significantly more information at rest, with an average 42% increase in “information gain” (a measure derived from relative entropy in a stochastic model of brain signals). This excess background activity was interpreted as supporting an “intensely active internal landscape,” which could explain withdrawal into one’s own inner world—a common characteristic of autism.¹

The autistic individual is overwhelmed with confusing, yet unignorable information that those around him can’t seem to notice or understand. The 99 are comfortable in the wilderness that the one cannot tolerate. And they are shunned for their inability to cope with circumstances beyond their control.

Our culture has come to recognize the sensory sensitivity of autistic individuals, and most places tend to be understanding towards those needs. But solutions often come in the form of adapting the individual to tolerate the environment, rather than changing the environment itself. Think of autistic kids wearing headphones or ear protectors, stimming and playing with fidget toys during a church service.

There are good reasons for this. As has often been explained by Jon Machnee, who researches autism and christianity, because the “needs” of individual autistics are so wide and varied, an ideal environment for one type of autistics might be tortuous for others. For this reason, it might be considered providential that Christianity has come to take on so many forms. Even if an individual cannot find something that perfectly embodies their ideal, there are places where they need to adapt less.

But addressing the social needs of the individual is much more difficult. More often than not, it is not sensory issues that lead to isolation, but an inability to decipher confusing patterns of speech, tone of voice, facial expressions and body language. These patterns vary widely across cultures, and within cultures, where different rules govern different arenas divided by class and gender. An analogous experience can be imagined by anyone who has traveled to a foreign culture with different social rules, but without the foresight or explicit knowledge of how things differ.

This analogy even explains the woes of the prodigal son. He has arrived in a foreign country with wealth, looking for friends. His explicit needs and lack of awareness mark him as a target for deceptive practices. Those who can “read” what he is looking for can offer him companionship and intimacy, for a price. But even the blatant transactionalism of prostitution is a refreshing change to someone who has struggled to decode the more complex rules of society. When he finds himself in the field “longing to be fed”, he has missed the fact that the citizen who has allowed him to work without oversight is probably expecting to lose a certain percentage of his fodder to his new employee.

As someone who struggles with these issues myself, I attribute much of my own success to being raised in an explicitly christian environment where “let your yes, be yes, and your no, no.” was seen as a virtue, as was the vulnerable practice of confession and forgiveness. Cultures that value deception are much more problematic. I can’t exactly differentiate the “typical” experience from my own, but I think that an appropriate metaphor comes from Charles Kovac’s analysis of Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parzival.

Parzival is a prototypical example of someone “on the spectrum”, raised in somewhat ill-conceived isolation by a sincere, if misguided mother, he is straightforward and honest to a fault. Yet as he encounters new experiences in the wider world, he regularly mistakes and misreads social situations. This leads to him questioning the concept of “God” that seems to dominate the medieval word, as he sees very little evidence that corresponds with the existence of a supposedly benevolent creator.

The deconstruction of his faith was a shocking detail in the early 13th century, as Kovacs explains:

When a man of the Middle Ages used or heard a word like “God” or “Jesus,” these words filled the soul with a warm, living glow, with an inner radiance. Just as, for us, the word “death” rouses automatically a certain feeling of dread — or, to take a very concrete example, the words “lemon juice” can bring the taste of lemon juice to your tongue — so for a man of the Middle Ages words like “God” or “Christ” had a certain effect, a warm inner glow — a feeling of comfort and security.

Young children, who are a bit like human beings of the past, still often have such a feeling — this feeling of warmth and comfort when they hear or speak the name of God.

In the Middle Ages this feeling was common, it was natural, and this is why the Middle Ages were the “Age of Faith” - because the words “God” and “Christ” still had this effect, a kind of warmth and comfort.But, if you go then to later centuries and read books, even religious books, written by devout, pious people, you can see — it is quite obvious — that the words no longer have the same effect. The warmth, the glow, has become less and less.

And in our time, the glow has gone. The words “God” or “spirit” have become like empty shells. For a small number of people, there is still a little glow in these words — and they are the few sincerely religious people who still exist today. But for the great majority of present-day humanity, these words have no longer any effect, or any meaning.²

What caused this implicit “feeling” that eventually vanished from the culture? It was a product of the social security provided by being a part of the flock; the invisible quality both created by and accessible to the 99 who could sense it— “porous selves” as Charles Taylor calls them, separate from the “buffered selves” of modernity, and (though he does not recognize it,) autistics throughout history. This sense of unity and togetherness blinds the flock to the problematic customs and practices that plague the individual. The aspects of the wilderness that in which they dwell become associated with that sense of normalcy.

It would be easy to say that this makes sense from a utilitarian standpoint, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one).” But this is wrong, because the 99 can thrive in the wilderness. They do not have a need. The utilitarian solution actually places the desires of the many, for comfort, or a reluctance to change, over the needs of the few and the one.

Of course this begs the question, if the problems of culture, the aspects of the wilderness that become accepted as the norm were invisible, what caused them to change?

For the most part, gradual changes came through the influences of minorities who pushed back against certain aspects of the cultural milieu. Groups of ten, who united in opposition to certain aspects of the status quo, could fortify themselves against the prevailing forces of the majority. But while this leads to changes in culture, there are always many aspects of culture that are never questioned. If they are only affecting isolated individuals, the individual becomes the problem.

This sheeplike function can also be weaponized against the masses. Some cultures are extremely resistant towards the formation of these groups of ten. Communist regimes that encourage citizens to spy on their neighbors reinforce the herd aspects of culture while suppressing opportunities for minority opposition to solidify.

This is not to say that groups of ten do not exist in such cultures. They are widespread, but they are segregated by sex, class, and centered around an affinity for things that do not disrupt the status quo of the larger group. Even minorities that challenge the ruling authorities can be tolerated, so long as they don’t disrupt the status of the larger body. The two party political system is a prime example. A party can dominate the opposition for decades, but both sides will still unite to keep a third party from entering the fray.

In this way, the reluctance to form novel groups of ten becomes a part of the wilderness protected by the social milieu. There is some evidence that this is the case within many muslim cultures, where a suppressed desire to adopt western values is extremely widespread. Everyone feels it, but no one, unless they find themselves in the position to act as an individual, like an anonymous interview, names it explicitly. Indeed, Kovacs remarks that this is very often the case within our culture regarding the loss of religious meaning:

“Some are afraid of admitting it — they pretend that there is something in the words — and they are the people who cling to some religious practice, as a custom, as a habit, but it is a pretence.”³

This is why tiny religious minorities will continue to seek a return to tradition that constantly points at majority positions with no hope of success rather than addressing the underlying conditions that lead to their demise. Which leads to the importance of the individual.

Jesus was an individual who refused to conform to the social forms of his day, and paid the price. Many people mistake his compassion for the sinners with solidarity. But if this were the case, Jesus would have simply become a champion of tolerance. That was not his position. While he most loudly and consistently called out the self-righteousness of both the Pharisees and Sadducees, polar opposites morally speaking, who colluded to maintain the status quo. The sinners and tax collectors were the victims smashed between the gears of their political machine. But no one was more opposed to sin than Jesus.

Jesus was the most individual. He loved all the sheep, both lost and found. He identified with them, but he did not find belonging among them.

Ultimately, changes to this status quo, and even the formation of novel groups of ten requires a break that can only be accomplished through the act of an individual. Someone must risk saying the thing out loud that no one else will. This used to result in death, which could be viewed as martyrdom, and might lead to significant change. Unfortunately, such risks now result in a kind of digital shunning; soft cancellation and shadow banning, where individuals are still allowed to speak their mind, but their messages are lost in the void.

When people do die tragically, they will be labeled as martyrs, if they can; but only for a specific and recognized cause. If the cause is inconvenient, it will be ignored, and the powers maintaining the status quo will instead make every attempt to drag the victim’s name through the mud. When a black person is killed by white police officers, it is labeled as a racially motivated killing. When Charlie Kirk was shot, many people declared he had brought death upon himself.

In my article on “The Dangers of Vibes-based Anthropology”, I showed how autistic people have escaped this trap through clever innovations. They have been able to correct the social and environmental pitfalls that cause them difficulty by producing solutions that so clearly demonstrate the problem, and easily correct it, so that they are readily adopted by the 99 who will also benefit.

By providing a martyrdom-level social change while still being allowed to live, such innovations create the dual benefit of an increased tolerance for certain eccentricities. By increasing awareness of their “divergent” personalities, others who relate can find each other and form the sort of small minority groups that are needed to truly thrive. This is one process through which autists can seek to be individuals and come to belong. It may be the only process.

In essence, that is the very point of my writing here. To cause those who wear the label of Christ to take stock of the groups in which they belong, and consider how that sense of belonging might be blinding them to the wilderness around them. Fortunately, The One who exposes the blindness of the flock is also The One who opens the eyes of the blind.

1. From Grok, citing a 2013 study (published in 2014) by researchers including Roberto C. Sotero, José L. Pérez Velázquez, and colleagues from Case Western Reserve University and the University of Toronto.

2. Kovacs, Charles, Parsifal and the Search for the Grail pg. 94

3. Ibid