Introversion

  This book was written just for me: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain.  It was published a year ago with some ballyhoo, so I'm surprised that I missed it.  I also missed Cain's marvelous TED talk of the time, one of the most viewed ever.  Pity, because she speaks straight to my heart.

  Why do I so respond to her?  Easy to say.  Those who have followed this blog know that I'm the quintessential introvert, a loner who much prefers reading and writing in solitude to small talk in a room full of people.  I wasn't surprised that I answered "Yes" to 18 of 20 questions early in the book, which placed me far toward the introvert end of the introvert-extrovert spectrum.

  Of course, all of us are mélanges of introversion and extroversion: sometimes we're withdrawn and risk-averse, other times we act boldly and throw ourselves into the fray.  However, truly dyed-in-the-wool introverts have a special onus to bear.  Cain compares their place in contemporary America to that of women in a men's world, discounted for the core of who they are.  They feel alienated from the glad-handing, back-slapping, group-joining, risk-taking affect that has dominated our history, mostly since the turn of the 20^th century.  The country changed radically at that time, Cain says, from a "culture of character," where what counted most was how one behaved in private (with seriousness, discipline, honor) to a "culture of personality," where what counts is an outgoing persona (gregariousness, charm, being a charismatic leader).

  Between a third and half of Americans tilt toward introversion, which is partially genetically based.  It finds its expression in the amygdala, the brain's "fight or flight" organ, which instinctively warns of potentially perilous situations. As babies introverts are "highly reactive," wailing when confronted with multiple new and/or scary objects.  As children they warily scrutinize a new social setting before joining it or fleeing.  As adults many painfully learn to act more extrovertedly, an adaptation that requires the brain's pre-frontal cortex, its analytic center, to override the amygdala by adducing from prior experience that a situation isn't so threatening as instinct first feared.

  The pressure to conform can lead to beneficial results.  Cain, a self-described introvert, tells of overcoming her own bête noire, panic at speaking to large audiences or even within small groups.  Her TED talk shows how successful she was.  But when the adaptation involves a denial of an essential part of one's temperament or values—say, enjoyment of quietude—it can cause disastrous inner conflicts, unhappiness and further alienation from society.

  The pressure starts at the earliest ages, both in schools and from parents anxious for their children to succeed.  Cain recalls a passage from William Whyte's 1956 book The Organization Man stating that concern for pupils' "social adjustment"—their ability not to concentrate on just one or two friends or be content by themselves—was beginning to trump concern for their intellectual achievement.  About that time, classrooms began to morph from desks arranged in ranks facing the teacher to pods of desks facing each other or circular tables accommodating several pupils, who were encouraged to work as groups rather than individually.

  Other books from the fifties—David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit—described the same syndrome of the collective displacing the individual in the broader world.  And Cain points to some astonishing statements from that decade: Harvard's provost declaring that Harvard should reject the "sensitive, neurotic" type and the "intellectually over-stimulated" in favor of boys of the "healthy extrovert kind," and Yale's president saying that the ideal Yalie was not a "beetle-browed, highly specialized intellectual, but a well-rounded man."  Colleges focused on what corporations would want in their graduates: active, gregarious types.

  Teamwork was also the motif in those corporations, which ignored the fact that creativity is mostly a lonely activity, conducted in quiet by people who are more introverted than not.  (See my posting from last May on this point.)  By the 1950s, corporate "brainstorming" in groups was all the rage; supposedly it drew out and developed the very best ideas from participants.  Detailed brainstorming rules were formulated by its inventor, Alex Osborn, a founding partner and the "O" in the advertising firm BBDO.  (Think Mad Men.)  Scientific studies later showed the technique to be a much inferior path to creativity.

  Is it any wonder that students rebelled so violently in the 1960s, Mario Savio charging that universities considered students simply as raw material to be formed into product and sold as fodder for corporate groupthink?  The subsequent hippie generation, while sometimes forming communes, didn't glorify the commune over the individual; indeed, its members escaped from the day's deified extroversion through the ultimate introversion: acid trips.  Lone, creative individuals found more space to breathe and more respect from their peers.  For a few decades, the tide turned a bit, and being an inward-looking individual regained some respectability.  As I have in past ruminations, I point to that day's Silicon Valley as a nexus where the lone inventor/entrepreneur became a model.

  But we're back to our old habits.  In the twenty-first century we have again lionized the glad-handed, ebullient risk-takers, those who plunged us into the Great Recession, just as we lionized their ilk in the 1920s.  Perhaps we're now a bit more wary of them than we were before 2008, yet I'm sure the boom-and-bust cycle will continue.  It's in our national DNA.

  Cain has set forth on a crusade: to enable introverts to bring out their hidden talents, their "quiet power," for the betterment of their lives and society; and for society to value its introverts more.  On her website, she urges them to "Join the Quiet Revolution."  She is their Betty Friedan (the crusading feminist of the 1960s).  I wish her well.

 

  Yet there's a long way to go.  To the great detriment of the nation, some introverts, especially women, are still dissuaded from choosing curricula like science and engineering, fearing the additional nerdy image that would give them.  And, in the aftermaths of such horrors as the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, introverted loners are increasingly viewed with suspicion as possible psychopathic loners, although introverts and psychopaths could not be more different: the former, being hypersensitive, are more empathic than normal, the latter not at all. 

  And where is today's reclusive but esteemed Thoreau?  Its Emerson?  I sometimes yearn for a return to the inward-looking "culture of character" of their nineteenth-century America, a culture of seriousness, discipline and honor, a culture lapping over enough into the Depression-chastened 1930s of my youth that my mother felt no compunction about encouraging my own introspective development.

  Okay, I'll admit it: when someone starts pining for "the good old days," it's probably a sign of cantankerousness or senility or both—in my case, I hope no more than the former!