Month: April 2012

Among salient points in Susan Cain’s book Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking) are 1) personality type in US culture was changed from rural agrarian-based values to values championed by urbanization and technology; 2) that introversion is not a failed extroversion but a distinct psychological reactivity that can be studied and objectified; and 3) introverts need to find a zone that best safeguards creativity and imagination in a world where the Extrovert Ideal (the West) is dominant.

Cain pleads the case for tolerance of introversion in society, workplace, and schooling because introvert qualities can better foster important social functions of creative and critical thinking, detail orientation, thoughtfulness and reflective forethought.

But the book’s summary of how introversion was eclipsed in the US by extroversion, from a culture of values such as integrity and character to a culture valuing salesmanship and glibness, can be made more robust. The shift was essentially that of capital’s triumph and the personality type needed to enforce this victory, first domestically through advertizing and fostering of consumption, then globally over the markets of the East where introvert cultures had to be overthrown. The process of imperialism and globalization hollowed out the dominant classes in the East in order to replace them with Westernized functionaries. The East was taken out of the East and replaced with the West. What Europe, especially Britain — succeeded by the US — did to India, China, Japan, and to Central and West Asian lands in an effort to dominant and force them to consume Western values takes on a new cultural perspective when considered from the view of cultural personality. In the US, the process was more baldly domestic because it was not foreign but familiar.

In this light, what can be expected of the hope that the dominant cultural personality of extroversion will accommodate introvert values or personality types? If the whole consumerist modern culture is oblivious to the fouling and destruction of nature and resources for the sake of control, what will change? Cain herself notes that when extroverts engage in risky behavior and the result is clear failure or destruction, they not only do not back off but accelerate the destructiveness, being “geared to respond” rather than accustomed to forethought and conscience. And that is the quintessence of what is happening today, with modern advanced cultures (of the West, or simply Westernized) accelerating self-destructive behavior — in finance, environment, war.

These observations are clearly corroborated by psychologist Robert Hare, who has studied psychopathy for decades. By definition, psychopathy is ruthless and egoistic behavior that excludes empathy in the desire for control, what might be ultimately considered behavior “geared to respond” in the most subjective and destructive ways. Unlike stereotypical versions of psychopaths being serial killers, psychopaths are cool, social, functional, and successful. Psychopaths effectively present a set of behaviors that are recognizable as aggressive in breaking rules, codes, and ethical expectations, but not necessarily criminal or illegal in what they do. They are often the culture’s heroes.

In Hare’s pioneering 1993 book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us presented the characteristics of psychopathy. The important conclusion Hare made is not only to narrowly refine the characteristics of psychopathy but to observe them on a larger social scale. Hare followed up this applied analysis in his 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, the basis of the intriguing 2009 documentary film I Am Fishead, with the startling opening lines (spoken by Peter Coyote):

Imagine that the most handsome charismatic person stares you straight in the eye and says: “You’re special. You look good. And you’re good at what you do.” He seems to know just what you like. He reads your innermost thoughts, and you feel like you’ve discovered a soul mate, a deep intimacy. You’re experiencing one of those rare fleeting moments that makes life worth living. Ah! Before you know it you’re involved in a deep personal bond … with a psychopath.

The film examines corporate settings for psychopathic behavior, and finds it, easily. But despite apologists who might consider such behavior exceptional, the corporate sector is the engine of modern culture, and its values must thrive on a degree of psychopathy that is cultural, let alone those flagship leaders within who spawn crime, corruption, control, power, war, and psychopathy. Susan Cain discovered the heart of personality in briefly talking to students at Harvard Business School. When she explained to them the topic of her research, they told her: “There are no introverts here.”

So the expectation that culture and society will in any way accommodate the introvert is extremely unlikely. Better for introverts to follow the rest of popular advice and find a safe niche in which to be creative.

The content of psychopathy applied to a cultural setting is also confirmed by the historian Morris Berman, who popularizes the subject of US society and culture, his most recent book being Why America Failed. In some ways, Berman’s reliance on anecdotal cases of ignorance on the part of Americans has been well covered by critics and comedians. For example, the ignorance of American high school students who do not know the name of their first president or of what country the US revolted against is familiar. A medieval audience or a contemporary one in poverty might have been and is the same intellectually. The point must be that the powerful do not necessarily want an educated populace, a populace to question, reason, criticize and express moral indignation. Ignorance becomes a cultural introversion without any of the virtues. Such a structure is necessary for the execution of a psychopathic policy inimical to the needs of others. A seamless explanation emerges, an indictment as much of the lack of values as of the dangerous potentials of misunderstood or ignored personality types and their effects on humanity. The introvert and the solitary need not abide in waiting for society to change; the evidence is everywhere that it does not.

Music is the most evanescent of arts because, by its very nature as sound, is an auditory experience that requires memory, retention, and feeling. Unlike a painting or sculpture or even the contents of a book, which require vision (vision accounts for 80% of our cognitive sense learning — and are solid objects variously interpreted — music can be heard but must be reproduced immediately afterwards to confirm the musical experience, let alone the pleasure or positive sensation experienced. Audiobooks are a substitute for vision, not the equivalent of the listening of anthropological and preliterate times.

Of the other senses little need be said. Our olfactory sense (our sense of smell) is a vestige of evolution and only serves to warn against injurious or foul gases or bacteria. This sense seldom rewards the average person who is not sensitive at least to the fragrance of a flower or herb. Our sense of taste similarly keeps us willing to eat but offers only passing pleasures. So works of music have a hard time not in getting our attention but in keeping it in our minds.

To the solitary or the purist, music is a grave challenge not because it is the creation or contrivance of another mind or personality, and not only because sounds of all origins are always competing with one another for authenticity. Music is a human creation yet not capable of restatement as an idea. One can talk about its effects but not reproduce it (the music) very effectively, especially that of an ensemble or orchestra. Unlike a painting or book, music emerges from a Pandora’s box. We must allow it to overwhelm us for the moment, to dominate the mental faculty, and to ring in our ears with themes and phrases and motifs — for days on end if we make the wrong choice of music or fail to put it in its place in our daily lives.

To successfully carry an idea or sentiment, music must be the vehicle of something else, something higher, more sublime, or on the other hand, more raw and emotionally primitive. This duality is not so forceful in objects of the vision because these are mental reproductions and remain static. They require that we assign emotions to them, that we be “pre-sensitive” to them. We can control their impact on our minds. Music is spectacle or accompanies spectacles, from entertainment to war. Spectacles are not sustainable ideas or emotions, do not sustain thought or reflection but directly affect the spirit, saturating the cruder aspects of what might be called the “id.”

Music can accompany the two faces of human endeavor — whipping up a martial frenzy or delicately interpreting the heavenly spheres. In between, music can pander to a variety of nuances, but always through human emotions and projections of positive or sordid. This plasticity of music is present but less obvious in painting or even writing, where the object lies static and lifeless unless a visitor sees merit or is willing to read doggedly and be inspired intellectually. The arts are often hijacked for the purpose of advancing a raw emotion or contrived idea. They often have little to do with reality and nature, even when we intend to express them as such. Books, paintings, and posters can try to conjure feelings, but music has a physiological function that can bypass the intellect.

Thus a typical painting depends on visual satisfaction but remains ocular and does not reverberate in our minds until the associations with ideas begins. A book remains short of a cognitive experience in its complexity, especially if it fails to move us to reflect and merely thrills us for the time of reading. We need critics to convince us of a painting’s value and scholars to interpret the place of a given book in the history of similar ones. These experiences are second-hand or even more hands removed.

But with some knowledge, skill, talent, or interest in music, a new part of human sensory faculties can emerge or be elicited, bypassing the mere visual or intellectual and striking directly at a mood, an atmosphere, a brooding or lightness, depending on the music taken seriously. Some sort of music moves somebody somewhere.

Perhaps this volatility of music is why Nietzsche revolted so strongly against Wagner’s primordial music of tragedy, death, and redemption, which militated against the ego-optimism of Nietzsche’s youthful mindset. Not so much the music was Nietzsche’s source of offense but the person and ideas of the composer. He knew the grandiosity of the music made it artistically difficult to refute as art, less dismiss. He transferred his resentment to the composer himself.

This transference is the perennial debate of art: Is the object of art to be held accountable for its creator’s flaws? Should we judge art ad hominum? In Turin in 1888, just short of his breakdown, Nietzsche wrote to a friend of the marvels of Bizet’s Carmen, in contrast to the heavy-handed Wagner. He makes the analogy of debilitated senses, the plea of weak eyes against glare — a utilitarian complaint for a moment of rest sought, not a music critic’s case but one weary and impatient with weighty themes. A little light music was called for. Different works of art have their appropriate times and moods.

Yet Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche are all passionately engaged with music as a tropos of aesthetics and philosophizing. They reach different conclusions, of course, and put music to different ends. Whether any given listener can endure the theory and will merely judge the music by their own preferences, dispensing with the critic’s futile interventions, shows us the subjectivity of music, especially when considering its popularization. Music today is largely utilitarian in being written to provoke a particular class of consumer to feel a particular subset of emotions. The phenomenon of the spectacle has become ubiquitous. Music is now the audio background to our humdrum daily lives and the places we frequent. With technology, more of it can be manufactured, separating us more and more from philosophy and aesthetics, more and more from silence and the authentic sounds of nature.