The Enigma

Recently, I saw the film The Imitation Game about the life of English mathematician Alan Turing. If you don't know who the man is, Winston Churchill described his contribution to winning World War II as more significant than even that of the Prime Minister himself. As if that weren't enough of a claim to greatness, he is also one of the men credited with creating what would eventually be called computers. One might expect a man with contributions to humanity as great as those to have been treated as a hero. However, there were two things that prevented Turing from receiving accolades for his crucial and groundbreaking work. Firstly, his work was classified, both during the war and for fifty years after its conclusion. Secondly, Turing was homosexual, eventually being successfully prosecuted for this reason and sentenced to chemical castration. Although he was eventually pardoned for this by Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, all that came far too late for Turing, who found the chemical castration so intolerable that he committed suicide rather than continue to suffer.

Although Turing cannot be properly considered autistic since all such labeling of historical figures is fallacious, he does demonstrate several of the symptoms. When I meet people who suspect they have autism, they commonly ask me to diagnose them, but I tell them I cannot because only a trained professional is qualified to do so. What I can do, assuming they share similar traits as myself, is tell them how to cope. In this way, The Imitation Game is very useful to autistics. There is a line in the film that appears twice and it goes, "Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine." Beyond autism, I think any person who is highly creative can relate to something in that line. Turing had a unique mind that made him socially inept and deeply strange, but it was precisely that unique mind that made him capable of the insight that only a machine could break the Nazi Enigma code. Throughout his life, he suffered for all the ways he was different, but he nonetheless accomplished no less than the most important achievements of the 20th century.

Part of why this film is getting so much acclaim is that it encourages us to value people who think differently than everybody else. Towards the end of the film, Turing poses a pointed question, which goes, "Just because something, uh... thinks differently from you, does that mean it's not thinking?" In context, he is drawing an analogy between how humans might view artificial intelligence and how most humans view his own intelligence. What wonders are you willing to squander by oppressing the only minds capable of achieving them? Perhaps you'd be willing to squander my own. Understanding written and spoken language like Turing understood patterns and numbers probably won't do much to change the world. Nevertheless, the kindness and patience I'm always saying autistics need to thrive might something society would be well-advised to make an effort towards. Someday, there may be a cure for autism and individual autistics will need to decide whether the wonders we can create are worth the hardships. Neurotypical, happy, and unaccomplished, or autistic, unhappy, and great? That is an enigma.

-Frank