Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking

America’s love affair with extroverts began in the early part of the 20^th century, when people like Dale Carnegie impressed upon our parents the importance of winning friends and influencing people in order to be successful. 

But our cultural preference for extroversion was not always a part of our national psyche.  In the 19^th century, America judged leadership potential the same way many countries do today – on the basis of integrity, judgment, reliability and intelligence.

The emerging growth cultures of Asia are not the only places in the world today puzzled by the America’s continuing obsession with popularity and by our insistence upon turning over most of our elective offices, executive management positions and financial control to people who would rather talk than listen, who make quick decisions based on gut instinct and who prefer risk to contemplation.

Susan Cain’s defense of introverts, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking weaves together research and personal anecdotes to make a case for taking a second look at the value brought to relationships and organizations by our quieter, more sensitive citizens.

She challenges the corporate focus on team building, open space offices and endless meetings, recounting histories of influential leaders who had a preference to work alone and in quiet.  She is surprised that scarcely an introvert is to be found on the hallowed grounds of Harvard Business School and wonders whether Enron or the economic collapse of the housing market would have happened if the investment banks had put in positions of responsibility fewer talkers and more thinkers.

 Ms. Cain’s chapter on raising sensitive children provides useful guidance to parents of children who don’t easily adjust to the forced extroversion of years of schooling in an environment better suited to outgoing personalities.

I’m not generally a fan of self-help books or psychological non-fiction.  I listened to the audio version of this book while running errands.  But Susan Cain is insightful and perceptive, and this book is worth reading.  

Marilynne Robinson on Culture and Religion

In an age when secularism and intellectualism are twin watchtowers against the encroachment of religious values into American politics, noted writer and scholar Marilynne Robinson provides both a defense and a critique of the role of religion in modern life in When I Was a Child I Read Books.

Known primarily for her fiction—Homecoming, Gilead and Home, all critically acclaimed—she has released a series of essays on American culture, politics and religion that reflect her exceptional insight and intellect.

Robinson’s principal thesis is that modern American life has been dumbed down and diminished not only by corrosive politics, materialism and marginalization of education, but also by turning our backs on all things sacred and beautiful, “everything in any way lofty.”  She blames both the secularists and the churches for this. 

She describes religious faith as something other than “a crude, explanatory strategy that should be supplanted by science” and argues that science and religion “should not be struggling for the same piece of turf.”

“Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word ‘soul’ and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit.”

Positing that “the language of public life has lost the character of generosity and the largeness of spirit that created the best of our institutions,” she makes the case for religion as a way to disrupt the constraints of “grasping materialism.” 

 “I realized gradually that my own religion, and religion in general, could and should disrupt [these] constraints, which amount to a small and narrow definition of what human beings are and how life is to be understood.”

In describing the soul as “the masterpiece of creation,” Robinson makes a cogent case for the importance of religion, like art and music, as a path to wisdom and to understanding the beauty and mystery of life.

David Brooks, The Social Animal

David Brooks’ The Social Animal is a dense book, packed with data, which may keep it from being an overwhelming commercial success.  That’s too bad because it contains much that it worth reading.

Brooks attempts to teach us about the importance of relationships through a story that is purportedly fiction, following the lives of several people from birth to death.  The characters, it turns out, are props to demonstrate various research findings about the human species, along with Brooks’ ever-insightful views about our culture.

I’m not sure the device of demonstrating psychological and sociological research insights through these characters’ lives works very well.  It probably should have been five or six books instead of one. 

Still, of the various non-fiction I’ve read recently, I keep turning to episodes from this book when talking to friends about ideas.  I don’t always agree with David Brooks’ bottom line, but I’ve never read anything he wrote that didn’t have something of truth and substance in it.

Here are some takeaways from The Social Animal:

Although people are often measured by external achievements (What’s your job?  Where did you go to school?), it’s the choices we make based on intuition and instinct that are more likely to determine our happiness and the measure of our lives (Who did you marry? What do you believe in?).

Research recited in the book on child development, education, careers, human sexuality, marriage and aging supports Brooks’ theory that the human animal is shaped essentially by relationships.

Particularly elegant is his debunking of our culture’s misguided overreliance on data to drive economic and political decisions and on money to solve problems, making a strong case for the superiority of the human mind over the computer.