Autistic Institutions (Part 2 Double Cognition)

Elmer Bischoff 'Self portrait' 1955

The title of this two-part essay is a provocation. It could suggest that institutions populated by multiple individuals are autistic in the same way that psychiatry considers some single individuals to be. That is not the reality. However, when governance institutions interact under constraints of uncertainty their problems are similar to mind-blindness in autism.

As observed in Part 1, institutional interactions can be effectively paralysed by lack of reciprocal understanding (uncertainty/contingency) about goals, meaning, and motives. There is a further possibility that institutional interactions may be disabled by unlawful (unexpected) change. And I have suggested that not-knowing is itself a structural pressure compelling legal, administrative, and political actors to respond to uncertainty within institutional constraints. By that I mean that they experience not-knowing (cognition deficit), and then the leading actors may respond to the uncertainty by systemising (cognition strength). This linkage between the deficit and the strength is similar to the reported correlation between cognition deficits and strengths among high-functioning autistic individuals. 

Now in Part 2 I will examine three levels of as yet untried entry for productively exploring conceptual and thematic overlap between institutional and autistic deficits and strengths: 

1. abstract system structuring, 

2. dependent systemising action, 

3. autonomous systemising analysis. 

1. System Structuring 

There is an old and reputable idea in social science that abstract autonomous structural forces move by their own momentum and create boundaries and background imperatives of concrete human agency. Human participants are not completely free to shape systems through agency, so the system structures the demand and scope for human agency. 

In the cases examined here, the problem can be simply stated as the constraint on cognition during interactions between institutional subsystems of executive power, administration, law, and representation. Now picture the interactions between a 17th century king and his court, a semi-autonomous crown civil service, competing law courts, and parliament as an emergent chamber of legislative and representational competition.

Institutional actors must work within the existing institutional structures, but the imperfect operations of the structures regularly reveal imperatives for change in structures (crises). Procedures of governance need perfecting. Interactions must improve. Understanding is required. So the actors are compelled to action new changes experimentally within the preexisting structures of historical institutions. In so doing they change the structures. 

High-functioning institutional structures produce more functional results. But it is equally true that the variance between institutions reflects the quality of the leading personnel. In this unfolding picture we clearly see a system operating. Within the social system there is an institutional system with a boundary (the state). The state is a system with interacting subsystems. System analysis reveals the dynamics of collective minds. Finally, all organic and social systems evolve only through the interactions between the parts of the system.

Therefore, any in-depth theoretical comparison between the science of autism and the science of society must consider the equivalences in their respective system dynamics. Although that particular comparison is not strictly required for the present analysis, it is worth noting the leeway for trespassing across soft/hard disciplinary boundaries with a natural science analogy. The issues are complex, but a simple train of thought can be briefly stated.

The brain is an integrated system of subsystems and sub-subsystems. One subsystem that is especially relevant to autism is the amygdala, which operates within the limbic system of the temporal lobe. The amygdala appears to be a key brain region for consciously regulating empathy-related emotions. Somehow it interacts across neural regions with the mirror neurone system in the frontal lobe, a brain response and coding mechanism whose imitative functioning is implicated in automatically processing empathy-relevant understandings of goals and intentions. It is apparent, therefore, that when neuroscientists identify relations between zones of greater or lesser activity in autistic as opposed to non-autistic brains they discuss complex system and subsystem interactions in the brain. 

This distinction between automatic-conscious neural functions reminds me of the sociological structure-agency distinction. In the social system there is a interaction process that somewhat resembles the relationship (as I understand it) between the amygdala and the mirror neurone system. Functional governance codes, which, for example, enable the basic binary institutional observation that a particular decision process is either impersonal or not impersonal, can be viewed as communication selector devices that automatically define, confine, and structure conscious human agency in relation to designated institutional purposes in the interactions within and between various subsystems of public governance. 

By stretching the adventuresome brain-institution analogy to its full elasticity one can see the following linkage: multiple regions of the brain are interactively coding and processing individual experience of the social interaction environment at the same time that multiple interactive social subsystems are coding and processing individual reactions to the social interaction environment. In both cases, and this is the point to underline, a possible system function of such equivalent coding is to process understandings of goals and intentions.  

I am doing no more than suggesting a general resemblance between autistic problems and solutions in two distinct self-referencing systems -- the brain (or psychic unit) and the social system. The core deficit in each is knowledge of goals and meaning. The core strength in each is systemising which creates understanding of goals and meaning. 

I offer just two examples. In institutions (viewed from both neoliberal and ordoliberal perspectives) the solution is to systematically depersonalise procedures. To that end, system structuring is the neoliberal route, and agency structuring is the ordoliberal route. 

Second, and comparably, autistic people potentially have a double route to functional compensation or melioration. They depersonalise their social interactions by regarding people as objects. And they systemise their environment. They may even systemise their social interactions. 

When a high-functioning autistic person treats people as objects this is not pathological or malicious but rather is a coping function of truth rigidity and empathy deficit tempered positively by concurrent traits like honesty and fairness. Equivalence with social systems is evident in objectification of people as performers of roles, occupiers of offices, or utilitarian categories. Baron-Cohen offers the example of a father who thinks his young autistic son regards him as “nature’s universal vending machine, the great button to all desire, which if pressed frequently enough will provide”. Institutions and the people who populate them are also functional dispensers of want satisfactions to categories of functionaries and citizens. 

It is important to add the observation that the ‘satisfactions’ dispensed by the state can be procedural rather than material. Neoliberals and ordoliberals can agree on that point.

To cut a very long story very short: If the minds of autistic people measurably display the interactional deficits and systemising strengths outlined in Part 1, and if these cognitive deficits and strengths are conceptually or thematically congruent with procedural deficits and procedural solutions of modernising institutions, there can be useful complementarity between two theories -- one about autism, the other about institutions -- with potential for productive synergy in relation to, for example, system self-correction or self-maintenance.

2. Agency Systemising 

The second entry for conceptualising institutional autism is through an examination of key individuals who are the actors creating social order. In their impersonal professional lives -- notably as lawyers, civil servants, and politicians -- they all equally depend on being sufficiently certain about each other’s goals and intentions in routine interactions. They have a strong interest in reducing contingency, in turning black boxes into white boxes. Assuming the existence among them of ‘autistic’ qualities with unusual preferences for predictability, rules and truth as well as unusual systemising intelligence, we can look for exceptionally purposeful, single-minded persons in positions with the power and ability to design institutions.

Having established that high-functioning autism is “a special case, where empathy is compromised but pattern-recognition and systemising are enhanced”, Simon Baron-Cohen then poses the question -- “where would Homo sapiens be if the Systemising Mechanism had not been ramped up to high levels? Arguably, we would not have as much (perhaps any) technological innovation, and we would still be preindustrial and prescientific.”

We use similar concepts -- and recognise similar strengths -- in the field of institutional analysis in order to better understand the rational-creative behaviour of the innovators of the institutions that enriched societies. This is one method we use to discover why high-functioning societies produced and utilised scientific and technological innovations more effectively than societies with dysfunctional institutions where innovators could not flourish. 

Although there is no obvious need to draw directly on psychiatric analysis, the study of institutional evolution does nevertheless prompt us to ask ‘autistic’ questions about the institutional designers. In order to achieve their goals these designers must have had unusual pattern-recognition capacity and systemising drive. In other respects we see that their ‘strengths’ were intriguingly like those of high-functioning autistic individuals. 

Let me repeat, these are correlations. The causation that interests me is not between autism and institutional design, but rather between comparable problems of not-knowing, ‘dependence’ on knowing, and solutions of systemising order that achieve predictability, law, truth, logic and fairness. In the case of institutions it is especially noteworthy that successful innovations improved the transparency of macrolevel interactions by treating people as objects, i.e. by depersonalising and formalising the core interaction zones. 

In earlier essays I have sung the praises of some exceptional highly purposeful 17th and 18th century politicians, lawyers and civil servants who risked their lives, livelihoods or freedom to reveal truth, to apply strong moral codes, to make English governance more predictable, rule-bound and lawful, and to establish good governance as an orderly routine. In some cases I can show their attention to detail and their skill in systemising. These men were not just law enforcers. They were literally the law creators. In other words, they displayed ‘autistic’ traits.

I can demonstrate in high-profile cases that an unusual determination to establish order and truthful consistency by notable pioneers of rule of law, impersonal administration, and logical-formal political representation was a response to the ‘autistic’ institutional difficulties of not-knowing. It is evident that some key institutional innovations in early modern history were solutions to double contingency, efforts to organise predictability, or reactions against deception, inconsistency, and imprecision. Furthermore, this epochal institutional progress was underpinned by a predominant single current of change -- also intriguingly associated with autism -- the depersonalisation and objectification of the relevant social relations.

Looking afresh at English history through ‘autistic’ eyes one sees the systemising of institutions in new light. I have been reading a top flight historian of English politics who describes the “regularisation” of mid-17th century parliamentary contests as emergent new systems created consciously in reaction to the unpredictability of the corrupt old system of representation. The creation of a new system was evident in the “compartmentalisation of values”, “routines with elaborate rules”, strict “oath-taking” and true “counting”. Personal “affections” for candidates were no longer the deciding factor. Contestants now opposed each other in “studious and objective” ways. As competition became more “systematic” the process of political selections was systemised. And, the “depersonalisation of the process of parliamentary selection” was “one of the most important elements” of this change.

Another historian perceptively examines the “depersonalisation” of state administration, starting in the 16th century and advancing thereafter with periodic bursts of energy led by named systemising individuals in counsels that claimed to bear disinterested moral logic and authority. It is no irony or coincidence that key persons figured prominently in each drive to replace persons with laws, to, in effect, automate some decisions. “Routinisation”, “codification” and “rule-making”, and “formalisation” of “elaborate repetitive procedure” eliminated arbitrariness, discretion and caprice. Bureaucratisation, if viewed autistically, had the objective of removing uncertainty from social interactions of governance. As the state expanded its functions it became more complex. Order and predictability had to be created anew with every change in financing, recruitment, remuneration, and discipline. 

The methods of a minority of creative leading officials who invented efficient systems and procedures were surprisingly entrepreneurial and innovative even in early modern times. 

Systemising drives were most evident in the domain of jurisprudence and applied law. Again, the relevant personal characteristics of leading personnel have been documented by legal historians. The common law was discovered and invented explicitly as a “system” only through the action of outstanding positivist systemisers -- like Edward Coke -- who organised information, recognised patterns, established order in the data with “artificial understanding” and systematic descriptions of rules, maxims, and principles in printed publication. Armies of lawyers and public officials cooperated with the new politicians to organise the fusion of law with administration and representation. Viewed autistically the process was active systemising on two levels - firstly conceptual, theoretical, scientific, and secondly practical, organisational, bureaucratic, political. Initially the optics are built to look inside the black box. Subsequently white boxes are constructed creating partial transparency. 

I have shown in my earlier essays on history that Patrimony-Patronage-Purchase and faction and interest coalitions did still rule the roost. The modern state did not emerge overnight. But I return to Baron-Cohen’s point. Where would human beings have been without the exceptional systemising individuals who created and discovered systematic sources of order? Their names are known, and their eccentricities make good narrative.

3. Observer systemising

I want briefly to discuss a third category of overlap between autistic individual and institutional cognitive strengths and deficits. I am referring now to acknowledged geniuses who spot patterns in society and economy, and who work those patterns up conceptually into theories relevant to understanding institutional dynamics and reform imperatives. 

Once again our starting point is Baron-Cohen’s theory of autistic systemising. The strength of perception among people he calls “hyper-systemisers” can be “genius” defined as “looking at the same information that others have looked at many times before and noticing a pattern that people have missed”. Unusual ability to recognise laws or patterns (truth) is precisely what creates the potential to manipulate the variables and modify or invent a system.

In the context of institutional development I am making a simple distinction between two categories. On one hand there are the ordo-systemisers, i.e., the designers or builders who systematically apply professional legal, administrative, or political skills to construction of institutions (‘agency systemising’). On the other hand are the hyper-systemising thinker-theorists, philosophers, ideologues, pamphleteers, or scientists who provide pathbreaking pattern-insights to explain or guide the action undertaken by ordo-systemising designers and builders. 

At the same time that the institutional entrepreneurs described in the previous section were building new institutions, some brilliant intellectuals were busy observing those same builders. These hyper-systemisers were recording and interpreting the events, noticing the patterns or repetitions and the structural ‘laws’ of change, giving names to what was going on, and explaining all these interlocking trends in terms that located their significance in the longer historical-philosophical trajectory and/or identified the absolute novelties of their own time. 

Thomas Hobbes was a classic example of the hyper-systemiser. Although at times an adviser to kings and other rulers, he was not directly engaged in institutional design or construction. His profession was teaching and philosophy, not law or politics. But he along with his contemporary republican intellectual opponents had a great impact on discourses of institutional change. Hobbes was a pattern-detector of the highest order. He observed the unfolding complex events with scientific genius and offered a simple theory to explain the emergence of rules for political order. Hobbes may have been the first systemising observer to adequately conceptualise the “social contract” and the state as an impartial “artificial” power distinct from persons.

The functional role of Hobbes and his intellectual peers of the day -- the systemising observers of institutions and builders -- is seen in terms of removing uncertainty and creating transparency by seeking truth and providing concepts, understanding, and science to use in analysing the functional social interactions relating to governance. 

Obviously the role of the observer-analyst complements the roles of the doer-designer. Both are concrete systemising ‘agency’ as distinct from abstract ‘system structuring’ in the general schema. 

Once again it is possible to see how ‘autistic’ deficits and strengths can be transposed to the institutional domain. The strength is single-minded attachment to truth, order, rules and predictability, ability to systemise, to separate-off impersonal categories from persons, and to detect and explain patterns. The deficit, i.e., not-knowing what is going on, is the reason for the need to systemise in order to know. Discovery of sources of uncertainty is the achievement that provides the raw material and the incentive for partial solutions. 

I wonder, in conclusion, whether the greatest autistic strength is capacity and willingness to recognise the unknowable. I do not necessarily infer that the greatest neurotypical weakness is an incapacity or unwillingness to recognise the unknowable. But it’s a thought! 

4. Summary and implications

What we have at the end of this exercise is the rudimentary foundation for a classic sociological structure-agency model into which I have blended an autism-neurotypical neuroscience distinction, and into which I can subsequently mix familiar components of political economy and institutional economics such as policy incentives, interests, ideology. 

After reading this essay some of you may still insist it is illogical or fanciful to identify parallels between separate things -- clinical autism and institutional order. I would defend it by drawing again on Baron-Cohen’s arguments. The first point is that the best recent autism research shows the border lines between ‘autism’ and ‘normality’ are fuzzy. 

“[It is necessary to] recognise how autism not only comes in degrees, but how it blends seamlessly into the general population... [and] today the notion of an autistic spectrum is no longer defined by any sharp separation from ‘normality.’” 

It seems justifiable to assume and concede that the exceptional leading personnel and observers of institutions exhibited functional characteristics and qualities which today are recognisably and uncontroversially associated with high-functioning autistic individuals. 

Their systemising achievements, intelligence, foresight, and endurance, along with their interest in rules, truth, and predictability, are all matters of the historical record. There is no need to claim these people were autistic. However, by conceptualising the institutional deficits they faced, and the strengths they applied when compensating for or diminishing these deficits, we open a new avenue for the study of institutional evolution.  

A second point, which again I will introduce by quoting Baron-Cohen, is that everyone faces autism-like not-knowing in social interaction to a lesser or greater degree. One of Baron-Cohen’s case studies is of fifty-two year old Michael who has autism: “Looking for rules is easy for Michael, but the social world, he has realised, doesn’t seem to have rules.” Michael is good at dealing with systems, but very bad at dealing with people. “His dream is to live in a world without people, where he can have total control.” 

Institutional designers searched for and created rules that made a large portion of our ‘social world’ easier to live in. I’m sure even Michael’s long struggle with autism would have been more difficult in a society governed by a state that had not yet depersonalised in order to modernise. No matter how effective our empathic understanding, we would face greater autistic difficulties in institutional interactions were it not for the solutions of yesteryear which created the interaction rules. Competence in empathy gives only limited advantage in impersonal interactions. Rules signpost our routes through the institutional maze. 

In a roundabout way Michael’s dream for “a world without people” has slowly but surely come true in the domain of governance -- with positive consequences for all of humanity -- through the historical depersonalisation of state institutions. The state still becomes dangerously personalised and overloaded in epochal fits and starts, and the movement from arbitrary discretion to predictable rules-based governance is always frustratingly two steps forward with one step back. But on balance it is possible to say that society is progressing.

5. And now a completely new concept...

I deem it appropriate to bring the conceptual discussion of the last few weeks to a close, and to celebrate by inventing a new concept that encapsulates what I have been trying to convey. 

I call it Double Cognition. I did toy with the idea of naming it Double Ordering, but that sounded too much like a mistake that happens in restaurants. Double Systemising was also seriously considered, but raises some problems of its own. Double Cognition it will be...

Think of Double Cognition as the Hellerian solution to Double Contingency. 

The double contingency of Parsons and Luhmann can be understood as referring to two ‘people’ (ego and alter) who are equally dependent on getting to know each other in order to transact, but at the same time equally uncertain about each others meanings, goals and intentions while interacting. 

My concept of double cognition or double ordering is ‘double’ in two ways. 

Firstly, double cognition can refer to one person (a psychic unit) interacting unequally with one institution (an impersonal unit). There are still two ‘actors’ as in double contingency, but the rules of the institutional order have removed or minimised the contingency. 

Secondly, double cognition refers to a two-step process. First a pattern-seeker recognises the cognition deficit (an uncertainty or gap in understanding). Subsequently a systemiser builds cognition strength (truth, order, predictability) to plug the gap in understanding. 

An artificial person (an institution) now stands between the doubting partners of double contingency. A surrogate discovery procedure has been created. 

That is all for now folks. I shall doubtless be resuming with narrative histories of the heroic early modern institutional systemisers. This week's reading sources are the same as last week's.

Previous posts in the Institution-Cognition-Solution series:
Autistic Institutions (Part 1 Double Contingency)  25/07/14
Hellerian Institutional Interactions  13/07/14
Neoliberal Solutions to Uncertainty  01/07/14
A Concise History of Not Knowing  22/06/14

Michael G. Heller ©2014