Chamblee54

As her publisher wants you to know, Susan Cain has a book out, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. She is making the rounds of book promotion.. Selling books is the chore of the extrovert, while introverts write them. There is conflict between the two types.
Ms. Cain comments on this conflict in her TED talk. “So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. It was my version of my grandfather’s hours of the day alone in his library. But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion.”
Introversion is not for purists. “Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there’s no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other.”
Many extroverts tag introverts with the dreaded label, negative attitude. Some introverts learn to deal with it. If you ask Mr. Google if introversion is negative attitude, you will be shown many results. A lot of these are incomprehensible to anyone without a graduate degree in psychology.
One of these papers has the catchy title Introverts and Extroverts: Close Encounters with Communicators of a Different Kind. It has an introduction, in a shaded headerbox. “The paper is paper is written with the primary intent of enhancing my communication knowledge. The comments and ideas expressed in this informational paper should not be perceived as authoritative. I have extremely limited knowledge in the area of communication theory. As an extreme introvert, I’m simply trying gain greater understanding of the complexities associated with human interactions.” Boy Howdy.
Another web piece, Introversion, was written in 1996, and posted on a tasteful background of turquoise dolphins. The author says that Carl Jung originated the concept of dividing humanity into introverts and extroverts. The duality goes much further back in history. “Many people throughout that long stretch of history have remarked on the fact that certain types of people liked Plato, and other types Aristotle. While my own theory involves masochism (at least in the case of Aristotle), Jung saw this as the difference between the introverted and extroverted personalities. The introvert’s flow of vitality is inward, while the extrovert’s is outward. For Plato, a horse’s existence flowed inwardly from the external ideal Horse Form. For Aristotle, a horse’s existence flowed outwardly from its internal causes and purposes.”
The A word is prominent in another quote. . “We usually think of introversion and extroversion in terms of personality types, but both are also attitudes. To illustrate: there is a temple with an idol in which, and to which, people perform religious services. An extroverted attitude would be that this is idol worship (and probably idle worship as well); an introverted attitude would be that the idol is symbolic of the inner aspect (meaning, or possibly divinity itself) that each person brings.”
This can be seen through from a different perspective. Some people feel that the Christian attitude towards the bible is idol worship. Many of these people are highly extroverted, with the focus of their religion (and often their entire lives) being convincing others to share their ideas. This is a religion which is dominated by loud extroverts, to the dismay of those who enjoy quiet contemplation.
Getting back to the TED talk. , we hear “And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. It’s only recently that we’ve strangely begun to forget it. If you look at most of the world’s major religions, you will find seekers — Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad — seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. So no wilderness, no revelations.” This is probably true, but you heard about this “fab four” because an extrovert told you. (Or pointed a sword in your face, and told you to convert or die.)
Ms. Cain sees this extrovert uber alles as being a product of modern society. “One answer lies deep in our cultural history. Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the man of contemplation and “man” of contemplation. But in America’s early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like “Character, the Grandest Thing in the World.” And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him “A man who does not offend by superiority.”
But then we hit the 20th century and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. And instead of working alongside people they’ve known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. So that’s the world we’re living in today. That’s our cultural inheritance.”
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Rowing is a team sport.