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  Of course, all of us are mélanges of introversion and extroversion: sometimes we're withdrawn and risk-averse, other times we act boldly and throw ourselves into the fray.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!

A Half-Century Time Loop

   Last fall I was jarred into what I would call a time loop by the onset of the Occupy movement.  A strong sense of dèjá vu propelled me back almost fifty years to relive the days of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, when I was beginning my professorial career.

  The tenor of American society as it entered the Sixties needs some portrayal for those much younger than I.  If I had to pick a word that best captures it, I'd choose "conformity."  In the previous two decades the nation had emerged from the Great Depression and gone through the traumas of World War II and the Korean War.  Veterans of those wars wanted nothing more than to get on with their careers and their families.  The Eisenhower years (1952-60) had brought an era of "normalcy."

  Conformity was reinforced by an anti-Communist hysteria and the blacklisting it entailed. Many around the country, including UC faculty in the early Fifties, had been required to sign loyalty oaths or be dismissed.  Although Senator McCarthy's crusade had ended in 1955 when his attack on the Army was derailed, the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was still a force.  Fear was palpable; I remember my mother in the Fifties hiding away books by Bolsheviks that she had bought in 1920 as a college student.

  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a 1950s book and movie, depicted conformity in business.  (The title was more than figurative; when I was interviewed in 1956 for a job at IBM I discovered that my friends there wore only solid blue or gray suits, white shirts and "discreet" ties.)  According to a 1950s sociological study by David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, the American middle class had become "other directed," being guided more by outside influences than from within themselves.

  I arrived at Cal in 1960 after a stint in industry.  The university I entered was shortly to be styled in UC President Clark Kerr's The Uses of the University as a "multiversity."  (Ironic that, having recently blogged about the universe and multiverse, I should now be writing about the university and multiversity!)  Kerr wrote that the university had become like a huge corporation: so departmentalized, so composed of and beholden to a bevy of competing interests, as to be governable only through a corporate model.  The book is a bit rueful, sensing a loss of something valuable: the university's center had shifted from its faculty to its administration.  "Faculty members," Kerr wrote, "are increasingly figures in a 'lonely crowd.' "  Kerr was of course referring to Riesman's book.

  The milieu I have outlined was the background of most students in 1960.  Yet a rebellion was in the offing, partially informed by the rising, nonconformist "beat" ethic that had strong roots in San Francisco.   Months before my arrival at Cal, some students had been participants in a riot in San Francisco when HUAC had held anti-communist hearings.  Sproul Plaza, the main venue on campus for student activity, was a bazaar of tables where causes ranging from left to right were advocated and organized, among them anti-segregation Freedom Marches to the South.

  In September 1964, the "bazaar" was suddenly shut down because of complaints by conservatives outside the University. The result was the birth of the Free Speech Movement, an explosion of rallies and sit-ins by thousands of students. Hundreds were jailed.  It was a unique occasion in which Maoists and Young Republicans joined forces.

  The FSM quickly morphed into a thoroughgoing indictment of the university itself.  In December, Mario Savio gave a speech that encapsulated the students' alienation.  If the university is a firm, he said, and its president a manager reporting to a board of directors (the Regents), then the faculty are simply "a bunch of employees" and students just raw material to be formed into product and sold to the university's clients.  This was intolerable.  "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part.  You can't even passively take part.  And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.  And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."  (A video of the speech is really worth watching.)

  The FSM's message ignited protests among similarly disaffected students around the world.  It defined the rest of the Sixties as it spilled over from universities to society at large.  These youngsters were saying that everything they saw in the conformist society around them was broken, unresponsive to "working within the system," because it was the system itself that had to change.  And change it they did.  The subsequent years of turmoil produced a new ethos for their and later generations that would have been quite unrecognizable a decade earlier.

  On awakening from this time-loop reverie, I was convinced that Occupy is a grandchild of the FSM.  Two generations later, Occupiers are as alienated from a broken, unresponsive system as were students in the FSM.  In the Sixties the FSM had sprung up in a system characterized not only by the multiversity, but also by a conformist culture,  stifling social mores, and racial segregation.  In the Tens, Occupy's frame of reference is a rapacious Wall Street culture, dysfunctional government, and a greatly inequitable distribution of wealth and income. Despite these differences, Savio's diatribe against "the operation of the machine," if spoken today, would no doubt strongly resonate with Occupiers.  Major changes in the system were then and are now called for.

  The Occupy movement is now restarting after a winter lull.  Last year it greatly increased public awareness of the appalling and growing wealth/income gap in the country (see the chart below).  As it reawakens, I hope Occupy will further focus the public on that gap and other inequities. 

  Some complain that Occupy has no agenda, that it is but an inchoate protest against the status quo.  I would remind them that the FSM had no agenda either, only an irrepressible and well-founded urge for change.  As in the Sixties, we might be in for some years of tumult.  If so, as in the Sixties, our now very unbalanced and unresponsive society will be the better for it.

      Source: New York Times, April 17, 2012

  Late Flash:  As I post this blog entry, I find that The Occupy Handbook, a 560-page compendium of articles about Occupy by noted economists, columnists and others, has been published today.  I have downloaded it onto my iPad  and am looking forward to reading it.