In her recent book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (2012), Susan Cain worries about a world ruled by what she calls the ‘extrovert ideal’. This, she suggests, found its most malign expression in the excessive risk-taking of those who brought about the banking crisis of 2008. Much of Quiet consists of telling introverts how wonderful they are: how we think more deeply and concentrate better than extroverts, are less bothered about money and status, are more sensitive, moral, altruistic, clear-sighted and persistent. If you’re an extrovert, the book probably isn’t for you.
(Joe Moran, The Crystalline Wall, in Aeon; hyperlink added; H/T Arts & Letters Daily) I’ve been reading Cain’s book and enjoying it a great deal. Yes, I’m pretty far over on the introvert side of things. And yes, the book does spend a lot of time telling introverts how wonderful we are.
Discount that flattery fairly deeply, introverts, unless you really think you’re worthless and unaccomplished compared to those reckless, thoughtless extroverts – the source of all the world’s problems. The book, read critically, can help you be a more effective and contented introvert.
I’ve long struggled with the canard that “you’d feel different if ….”
I first recall getting that thrown at me personally, on the subject of abortion, by a sociopathic female attorney, who has moved on, off my radar, past the lives she’s shattered. “You’d feel different if it was your daughter” she insisted decades ago. Like “you’re on the wrong side of history,” this is really no argument at all, or is at best circular.
But it is true that for those who’ve had trouble entering empathically and imaginatively into another world, or who’ve simply triaged things mentally and decided they didn’t have time to try doing so, a forceful personal crisis can definitely catalyze things.
Which brings me to the first semi-serious bioethics conference I went to, at Stanford, more than 25 years ago now. It featured Margaret Pabst Battin from the University of Utah as one of the speakers who generally was on the wrong side from the perspective of conference organizers. She certainly had not triaged issues of bioethics to the back of her mind; that was her field. Nor was she lacking in personal experience. Her own mother’s painful death in her early adulthood was formative.
Now she and her husband have personally been through the sort of life-changing crisis we talked about, and her now-quadriplegic husband echoes some of the themes of disability groups like Not Dead Yet, which was also present at the Stanford conference. “I love my life,” he exclaims.
That kind of surprised him, too. According to his Living Will, they probably shouldn’t have revived him after that high-speed bike wreck, the fracture somewhere up around C2.
He has wanted to die a few times. It hasn’t quite worked out. But most of the time, he wants to live. That’s not, at least as told by the New York Times feature writer, a fear of death, but rather love of life.
I’ve heard enough people like him over the years that I avoid saying “I’d rather die than [fill in the horrible disability].” Maybe if I get there, I’ll find it intolerable, but for now, I affirm that life is good. Period.
Earlier this month, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute held a summer program for college students in Louisville, Kentucky. Titled “Arguing Conservatism,” the event featured faculty lectures followed by student debates on issues of Constitutionalism, foreign policy, and economics. The latter posed the question: “Resolved: Capitalism is Compatible with Morality.” ISI staff labeled the debate teams for this session “Porchers” versus “Austrians”! A good time was had by all. What follows is the text of my talk on behalf of The Porcher Cause….
(Allan Carlson) Carlson’s tour de force argument, which apart from a few distracting typos I highly recommend for anyone who thinks capitalism and socialism are the only economic alternatives, can be read here. It’s all good, but here’s my favorite quote
[C]apitalism undermines true economic liberty and democracy. Concentrations of economic power, be they personal or corporate, inevitably buy political power. This used to come through simple bribes; today these entities buy political power through “bundled” campaign donations, the threat of negative advertising, and the promise to elected officials or state regulators of lucrative future employment. Capitalist enterprises gain, in turn, no-bid contracts, valued tax breaks, barriers to entry for potential rivals, and indirect control over regulatory processes, so that they favor the big firms and penalize the little ones. Put another way, in the real world, capitalism invariably nurtures crony capitalism, corrupting markets and the democratic process.
(emphasis added) and favorite anecdote:
In praising the “Magnetism of the Garden,” he told the story of a friend who was showing the family gardens of several workers to a “dogmatic old-time liberal;” some think this was Ludwig von Mises. In any cause, Roepke continued: “on seeing these happy people spending their free evenings in their gardens,” the laissez-faire liberal “could think of nothing better than the cool remark this was an irrational form of vegetable production.” Roepke retorted: “He could not get it into his head that it was a very rational form of ‘happiness production’ which surely is what matters most.”
In an alternative universe, infinitely removed from that of Allan Carlson (where children have parents, and the primary economic unit really should be the family), is a repulsive piece, apparently not intended as self-satire, by the androgynous Laurie Penny in the New Statesman.
There’s no doubt in my mind that I prefer Carlson’s world to Penny’s. And there’s little doubt that our Nine Robed Masters prefer Penny’s.
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
(Eric Hoffer, quoted by Bill Kristol, in turn quoted in “Has the G.O.P. Gone Off the Deep End?”)
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 