Parnassus Reads

Remember those fun (but mind-numbingly long) personality tests you used to have to take in high school? You know, the ones where you learn what combination of I-N-S-T-J-P-F-E you are? (I honestly can’t remember mine but I know the first two letters were I and N, which means that I’m an intuitive introvert). Or what your color or animal you were (red and lion, oddly enough. I must have cheated on one of them). I’m not sure if they still give the Meyers-Briggs in schools, but it’s no secret that those kinds of questions are becoming ubiquitous on job applications. It’s also no secret that collaborative learning and working environments are taking over, which can be a serious problem for introverts, or anyone whose letter personality starts with I. A new book by Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (1/24/12), argues that together is not always better, and that there is power in individuality. In a recent NYT article, “The Rise of the New Groupthink,” Cain writes:

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

Little clueless me thought we were still in the heyday of Office Space, where one of the biggest gripes was how small your cubicle was. Aren’t corporateemployees just stuffed into little 4×4 cells, forced to toil away behind drab, concrete colored fabric pretend walls, with no human interaction beyond headsets and water-coolers? I thought that was the existential dilemma facing today’s corporate drones. Well, apparently not. Now they’re complaining about a lack of walls. Now they’re saying they have no private space in which to hide, to rest, to retreat, at least according to Cain. This does not bode well for those creative types:

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature…One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation.

Sheesh. Why can’t everyone who has jobs just be happy with them? Why can’t we be happy for them? Why can’t we just be happy? Well, for one thing,
centuries of Romantic idealism has taught us that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to anything involving human interaction. We have gone from the nameless masses to the individualistic and ego encompassing “I” that tells us we can not only choose what we want, but that we have the right to have it too. Am I attacking modern human existence? Not really, but there are some problems with it. Cain’s answer in the NYT piece is “to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time.” If cubicles aren’t the answer to the modern corporate employee’s existential crisis, but neither is open, privacy negating space, then what’s next? Giving everyone their own office? Maybe when hell freezes over, says the multi-billion dollar CEO.

Reading this puts me in mind of Ayn Rand’s famously anti-social, introverted, hard-core capitalistic protagonists. The comparison isn’t perfect (and if you hate me for it go ahead and tell me about it in the comments), but it’s the middle of the Republican primaries, and with all the political rhetoric floating around, I can’t help it. I love Rand’s books (yeah, I do), but I disagree with the ferocity of her politics and ideologies. I’m also put in mind of a book that came out several years ago: Anneli Rufus’s Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto. I’m not sure Cain’s “new groupthink” is all that new but I like Cain’s suggestion for a nuanced approach to work and school environments, but I wonder how many corporations are willing to be so nuanced in an age of numbers over anything else. I think there’s more room for nuance in education, and it’s up to teachers to recognize the needs of her or his students and to schoolboards to allow teachers the freedom to teach with the individual student’s best interest in mind, not just test scores and state/government funding. I’ve taught freshman college English for the past year, and I’m training to teach HS English, so I am very interested in these kinds of discussions. Collaboration does have its place, as Cain notes, but so does solitude. What she recommends, and what I agree with most, is a balanced approach to both.

Cain, Susan. “The Rise of the New Groupthink.” NYT. 13 Jan. 2012. Web. 18 Jan. 2012