Aspergers and Empathy, Part 1

I saw a video the other day on YouTube called The Empathic Civilization.  You can see it here. 

While very thought-provoking as a talk it made me uncomfortable, perhaps even feel beaten upon.  The ending premise is that humans need to bring out "empathic sociability" and prepare the groundwork for an "empathic civilization", which Prof. Rifkin believes is necessary for us to continue as a species.  Without this empathy we will turn to narcissism, materialism, and aggression rather than showing solidarity with each other and the rest of the biosphere.  If you listen closely he refers to humans as Homo empathicus, which is essentially saying that empathy is what makes us human.  The only problem with that premise is: there is no place for me in such a world.  Nor, I suspect, is there a place for my fellow autistics.

I've spent a long time in self-examination since discovering I am on the autistic spectrum.  One of the things you will find is that there is a great deal of debate as to whether or not autistic people feel empathy.  I have read a lot of papers, studied many definitions of the word "empathy", and I can tell you it is my belief that I personally do not have empathy.  I suspect that my fellow autistics also technically do not experience empathy. 

Which is not to say that autistic people are not capable of feeling emotions, quite the contrary.  In fact, I believe that autistic people in many ways feel more strongly than a neurotypical does.  Here's some interesting facts.  It is estimated that 85% of autistic people suffer from alexithymia, which is the inability to correctly identify and describe emotional states in themselves or in others.  However, once they are aware of another person's frame of mind, the autistic person actually seems to respond much more strongly than a neurotypical does.  As a result, there is some evidence that autistics repress the ability to empathize with others because it is too painful.

I'm an analytical chemist, my job is to understand what is being measured, what the true signal is.  What if the reason autistic people appear to not be able to identify emotions in others is that we do not feel the same emotions as other humans?  It would be like expecting a blind person to explain the color green.  Maybe we can't describe our emotions the way a neurotypical does because to us it is experienced so differently that we lack a common vocabulary. 

It's not that people with ASDs do not have empathy, but that the entire concept of empathy is not really applicable.  Does that make us less human?