Introversion, Susan Cain's Book, and Little Moments of Grace

"I don't believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you're that rare engineer who's an inventor and also an artist, I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone." -Steve Wozniak in iWoz

"Top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption." -Susan Cain in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking

"True self-esteem comes from competence, not the other way around. Researchers have found that intense engagement in and commitment to an activity is a proven route to happiness and well-being. Well-developed talents and interests can be a great source of confidence for your child, no matter how different he might feel from his peers." -Cain in Quiet 


A couple days ago, a teacher named Claire Needell Hollander wrote an interesting opinion piece called "No Learning Without Feeling" for the New York Times. In it, she challenged some of the assumptions of standardization and the generic texts that come with it. Instead, she argued, students need to read works of art that move them, that affect them personally. Anger, sadness, joy, pain, it doesn't really matter: we need to feel in order to learn.

The implications for education are many, but this is also an important observation for our daily lives. The best learning, and I'll go ahead and call it true learning, takes place when our minds and our hearts connect. We need both.

I've been noticing lately that I can't read as indiscriminately as I used to be able to, which might not bode well for more graduate school. What I mean is, I have a pretty low tolerance and patience for books (or articles for that matter) with which I don't deeply connect. It's getting harder to read books I feel I "should be reading" because I prefer reading material that moves me, that speaks to where I am. It was in that vain that I recently picked up Cain's book, Quiet. My interest was mainly in trying to better understand my now-dead brother, Shane.

You see, he and I were very different, and this was true for the whole of our lives. He had brown hair; I had blond. As a child, he built elaborate lego communities; I migrated toward sports equipment. He was a musician; I was an athlete. He liked to write fiction and poetry; I prefer nonfiction. He would juggle multiple books at a time but rarely finish them; I would plow right through to the end of whatever it was that I had open. He was seemingly late everywhere he went, whereas I was more timely. My life was highly organized, and his was, well, messy. The list could go on. These differences showed up very early in us (nature), but if we take Cain seriously, these traits also developed along the way (nurture) based on the social course of our lives.

Perhaps my own activities -- especially success in sports -- gained more attention, and as we grew older, he seemed to be trying desperately define the definitive difference between us. He was an introvert, and I was an extravert, he informed me. For some reason, that didn't completely satisfy me, but his conclusion was spot on, I think. Something like: "We're different, and I don't need to be like you."

I wish I (and we) had listened better. I read Cain's book slowly, and indeed, she seems to side with Shane in that as a society, we are more accepting of extraversion and often try to subtly or not-so-subtly convert introverts. It was in the midst of that realization above all else that I was able to glimpse a little more of my brother's pain, to see some of the odds stacked against him.

In my own grieving process, I've come to understand these as "little moments of grace." During these moments, I'm able to see, understand, and even connect with my brother long after his last breath. I'm sure there were times in his life when I loved him well, but there were also many other times when I was simply impatient with who he was and the ways in which he was different from me. I tried so hard to change him.

I think we do that a lot in life. A lot of married couples out there are probably familiar with the Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts. Admittedly, I'm not married and haven't even read the book, but I've heard it talked about enough to know that the gist seems to be that we tend to love how we want to be loved, which isn't necessarily the same as the person to whom we give our love. The result is often well-intentioned but disappointing because we don't love or get loved the way we want or need. Obviously, Shane and I weren't a "couple," but I think this happened to us nonetheless. We loved each other the way we wanted to be loved, which often meant completely missing the boat.

Cain's book was also helpful for my own self-understanding. In fact, it is a book I would recommend to anyone who was trying to understand himself or the people around him better. For example, by taking a few personality tests since I began reading, I've found out why I was so uncomfortable with the dichotomy Shane drew between us. While he saw himself accurately, he mischaracterized me. I am an introverted-leaning ambivert (meaning I have characteristics of both introversion and extroversion). To use some of the language from Cain's book, my best guess is that I am a high-reactive (which tends toward introversion) but reward-oriented (which tends toward extraversion). Thus, the mix.

So while I was definitely more social than Shane was, I am definitely not an extravert. I work much better alone than I do in groups. After spending time in large groups, I definitely need to recharge alone. And yes, I do live a lot in my mind, which probably has something to do with why I enjoy writing so much.


Questions for the reader: Have you read Cain's book? What did you think? Are you an introvert, extravert, or ambivert? How does this play out in your own life, relationships, and work? 

Creation, Fall, and Redemption in Milton and Dante

So many of the twenty-something Christians I know read books popular books from the likes of Don Miller and Rob Bell as soon as they hit the shelf. While there is nothing inherently “wrong” with that, it does concern me that so few of them have read anything that was written before 1900. I’ll admit that I, too, have read a fair share of my Miller and Bell and too often fall into the trap of not varying my reading enough. But thankfully I was forced to pick up John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s The Divine Comedy in graduate school.

The epic form did not exactly win me over as a genre, but learning about and reading Milton and Dante was still valuable. Perhaps not surprisingly, in my class, Milton and Dante were often too quickly dismissed as "old-fashioned" and “judgmental,” and “narrow-minded” without all that much close examination. I do, however, remember a few discussions in which the work was taken seriously. And for brief moments, we considered the paradoxical possibilities that faith could be married to reason or that humility could be combined with confidence.

I.  Thinking, Living, and Writing from a Worldview

One of the most obvious observations I could make when reading Milton and Dante was the way in which a Christian understanding of God, the cosmos, and humanity was the driving force behind their ideas, their literature, and even their political engagement. (And this was long before Harry Blamires’ helpful book, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think.) 

This is not to suggest that they were Milton and Dante were perferct, that they did not draw on influence from classic literature such as Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, or even that the two poets were "the same." The differences between the two poets were vast: Milton was an English Protestant from the 1600s who favored some form of democratic government, while Dante was a thirteenth century Catholic Italian who preferred monarchy. 

C.S. Lewis deemed certain elements of Milton’s book heretical, and many readers are still not thrilled with Dante’s naming real names for the characters in Hell. But for all the many criticisms we could fling at Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy, it cannot be denied that the writers put forth brilliant literature that was informed first and foremost by a Christian worldview.

To live out of such a worldview is not the same as groupthink. Indeed, the aforementioned Blamires' book offers a set of starting points — not end points — from which a Christian might analyze and discern in this world. For the specifics of those starting points, check out the book, but the concepts that seem to drive Milton and Dante’s work — particularly when read together — are the old tenants of creation, fall, and redemption, all of which are not so much ancient dogmas as they are a way of life.

II. Milton, Creation and Fall

Sadly but so truly, creation is the beginning and not the end of the story. As Peter Fiore wrote in Milton and Augustine: Patterns of Augustinian Thought in Paradise Lost, Milton believed “evil is the perversion of a good nature by will gone bad.” According to Genesis and Paradise Lost, our distant grandparents, Adam and Eve, fell for Satan’s lie that certain fruit was “able to make gods of men.” It might sound silly in a story about a snake in a garden, but maybe our current political and cultural realities bring the temptation closer to home. What does social media offer, but a chance to become a virtual god, made in our own image? What sorts of outlandish, god-like promises do we hear during political campaigns? Or sports? In the highly-acclaimed 1986 film, Hoosiers, Myra Fleener observes that “a basketball hero around here is treated like a god.” But these idolatries, like the forbidden fruit in Eden, are lies waiting to disappoint us.

Milton believed that the world was made by God. The epic says it this way: “Immediate are the acts of God, more swift / Than time or motion.” But it is important to Milton that the world was not only made, but also good. The epic stated it this way: “God and nature bid the same.” In his Comment Magazine article, “Sex is Easier than Love: Why Sexuality is at the Heart of Life and Learning,” Steve Garber makes a similar claim, that “ truth is woven into the fabric of the universe.” These truths bring with them plenty of responsibility for how to treat our neighbors and the earth. If God made these things good, then are we not opposing His work when we do work that destroys them?

III. Dante and Redemption

While the Fall certainly affects us all these years later, it is not the end of the story, either. It would be quite easy as we read The Divine Comedy to get so caught up in the characteristics of Hell and who resides there that we miss the main point: the redemption of The Pilgrim. Sometimes we have to experience distance from God before we can embrace His presence. As Peter Hawkins writes in “Dante’s Rehab,” “none of the souls who appear to Dante throughout his ascent to the city of God actually spends eternity where the pilgrim finds them.” Due to the figurative nature of the epic, that should be interpreted in the context of life before physical death. And so even as Dante writes, “Death has ruined, undone so many men,” painful circumstances or consequences or sin need not be our stagnant destiny.

Hawkins goes on to point out one of the best redemptive examples in The Divine Comedy: Rahab the prostitute (from the Old Testament book of Joshua), who The Pilgrim sees in Heaven. According to Geoffrey Nuttal in The Faith of Dante Alighieri, Dante believed such a place “exists, is winnable, and by some has been won. And by some it has not been won—it has been lost.” The journey there—from Fall to Redemption—is offered for those willing “to take another road,” which is “the hardest and wildest way.”

That’s key, isn’t it? If we are to journey well in this life, we must take “the hardest and wildest way.” But the hardest way isn’t the way of vice and addiction; that is the escapist way. Nor is the wildest way the way of absolute conformity; that is the easiest way. A way that is more wild and hard is the way of resisting the cultural norm when it runs counter to the norm or norms that God the Creator has set into motion. It involves being honest about our own sins. It takes trust and submission, the acknowledgement that we are not and nor were we ever meant to be our own gods. 

Question(s) for the reader: Have you read Paradise Lost and/or The Divine Comedy? What did you think? Have you given any thought to the cultivation of your own worldview? 

Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaey should look to Virginia Prisoner and Former D.C. Sniper Lee Boyd Malvo as a Potential Role Model

“We’re not logical; we’re moved by our deepest sentiments. For the most part, we think about and rationalize later. I mean, look at the world we live in today. What we feel most deeply about, whether it’s wittingly or unwittingly, whether we know or don’t know, whether it’s conscious or with an unconscious drive that’s what we’re going to act on.” -Lee Boyd Malvo 

"If you do not confront your pain, if you do not face your problems, they will find you and defeat you..." -Malvo

By now, you know the name Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, allegedly one of the two Boston Marathon bombers and the only one still alive. A few weeks after the event, Tsarnaev appears to be making it health-wise, but still has a major hill to climb at trial. With our mob-like public having long decided his guilt, he will almost surely get convicted, but his fight against a death penalty received a major boost recently with the addition of the reputable attourney, Judy Clarke, to his defense.

My interest in the death penalty probably began as an undergraduate with the reading of Sister Helen Prejean's brilliant book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. It is certainly worth your time to read if interested.

In a world full of as much evil as this one, I certainly can understand the appeal of the death penalty, and can't really fault someone for supporting it, particularly if they are connected to a murdered victim. But a good friend of mine works in building cases for death row inmates to stay alive. As you can imagine, it's grueling but good work. She tells me that so many of these inmates, even the ones who are legitimately "guilty," came from out of such awful and unimaginable situations. I'm not surprised, since wounded people wound, as they say.

And yet, there's more. After a murder near my hometown (of 1,400) a couple years ago, three poor and drugged-up young men (of course) were arrested, one of which played on my little-league baseball team way back when. My sister writes them somewhat regularly. And one goes to trial with the possibility of the death penalty.

And then there is the fact that my older brother, who had never before committed a violent act, committed a very-public murder-suicide a little over a year ago in Jacksonville, Florida. So yes, I am close to the issue of young men who somehow reach such desperation. And I cannot help but regard the death penalty as inhumane and lacking any real justice, not to mention that its opposition comes seamlessly, I believe, out of a consistently pro-life position.

To get back to the topic at hand, it seems like Tsarnaev, unlike his older brother, was and is very much "alive" in the fullest sense of the word. Well-liked, good-looking, a high-school wrestler, a scholarship winner, and a pickup basketball player. No doubt full of fear and shame, he has cooperated with his investigators. With his parents across the world, I can't help but empathize with his desire to please his brother to the point of following him to possible death, tragic as that decision really was for him and others. None of this is, of course, to suggest that he isn't responsible for the deaths and woundings of so many.

Obviously, there's no guarantee that Tsarnaev, at 19 years old, won't receive the death penalty. But I hope he doesn't because he's just got too much life ahead, too much life inside him, even if that life is now justifiably pretty closely-monitored inside a tight space.

If the courts let him live, Tsarnaev would be wise to familiarize himself with the name Lee Boyd Malvo. Malvo, as you may remember, is one of the two D.C. snipers from back in 2002. He was 17 at the time of his arrest. The state of Virginia executed Malvo's mentor, John Muhammad, in 2009.

But Malvo didn't get executed, and Tsarnaev (and the rest of us) would do well to listen and watch him. Josh White of the Washington Post released an interview with Malvo in 2012, to which I listened with much fascination. It is with no intended disrespect to the families of victims during those awful three weeks that I try to take Malvo seriously here. But incredibly and against all the odds, he does seem so so thoughtful, articulate, and vulnerable, even after this much time in prison.

I believe him when he paints the picture of being completely manipulated by Muhammad. As he put it in the interview, "(Muhammad) said 'Jump,' and it was 'How high?'"

But how could anyone have been so gullible?

Malvo, whose own parents all but abandoned him entirely, explains: "He gave me his time! Time is the only thing we possess, and how we use it tells us what we value. He gave me his time, and he was consistent. Even though the consistency was madness, he was consistent. He gave me his time. He was one of the only people who listened…It was that simple because no one else had the time for me."

In a generation of fatherlessness (both physically and emotionally), I do not find his psychology all that incredible or hard to believe. But what really stuck out about the interview was the different ways he's continuing to live a meaningful life: by reading, by writing poetry, and by practicing yoga. "I've had to be my own psychologist, therapist, counselor, and priest. And I've basically spent the last seven years in recovery."

I certainly look forward to watching the rest of Malvo's journey, to the degree that I can. If you have any interest in connecting with him through a letter or by financial support, you can do so through his Facebook page, which is orchestrated by a friend of his.

Boldly, Malvo told White that he didn't think his punishment was necessarily the right one, a statement on which I mostly agree with him. "I was a child, man," he rightly points out. That isn't to say that he shouldn't spend significant time in prison, and he admits as much, but I guess I kind of think he should get a chance to get out at some point, assuming he behaves himself inside those walls.

Regardless of what you and I think about Malvo's punishment, Tsarnaev may very well end up in a similar situation. The two have striking similarities: their youth, their parental absence, their immigration, the role an older person played in their schemes, and most of all, the way neither seems completely cold and hardened, which is what gives me the most hope in both instances. May they find a way to connect. 

Question(s) for the reader: Do you think Tsarnaev deserves the death penalty? Why or why not? Do you remember Malvo? Have you listened to the interview?