December 10, 2021
We seem to be witnessing a reluctant acknowledgment of inwardness. In 2012, Susan Cain revived the debate over introversion and extraversion with her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, which became a best-seller. American society being what it is, the focus of the discussion was introversion in the professional world: Cain, an introvert, had a successful career as a high-power lawyer. Apparently the business world is in the process of deciding that energy, confidence, networking, and a can-do attitude may not be enough, that perhaps aspiring business leaders need to counterbalance their enthusiastic extraversion with a bit of sensitivity and the ability to listen. A new coinage has appeared to express the new demand, as Emma Beddington informs us in “Introvert, Extrovert or Other: Welcome to the World of the Ambivert,” an article in The Guardian on December 2. She cites a book by Dr. Karl Moore, We Are All Ambiverts Now.
Ambiverts? Really? I find it a bit of a silly term, but its users are well-intentioned, and I am not disposed to quibble over it. I doubt that we are all ambiverts, but it would be nice if American society confronted its neurotically one-sided extraversion. I am disposed to quibble over the spelling of extraversion. There was a reason that C. G. Jung, the depth psychologist who made both terms famous, spelled “extravert” with an “a”: he knew Latin. “Extra” is the Latin prefix for “outward” or “outside.” “Extro” is a misspelling, mistakenly modeled on “introvert.” Jung should also not be blamed for some of the reductionistic discussions of the terms, which have spawned a whole industry. As Jung uses them, the terms imply a distinction with profound implications.
Jung understands extraversion and introversion not as minor temperamental differences but as defense mechanisms, means of survival popularly expressed by the terms “fight or flight.” Introverts are accused, rightly enough, of being afraid of the world outside themselves: they are often in flight from it; they erect walls to keep it at bay. But the extravert’s enthusiastic embrace of other people and new experiences is also defensive. The extravert renders the social world safe by conquering it, either peacefully, through befriending and networking with it, or by dominating it through various means, ranging from assertiveness—often rationalized as “leadership”—to manipulation, learning how to “master the system.” Jung’s treatment of the distinction is profounder than most because Jungian psychology is based on a model of the psyche as a conflict of opposites. The problem with “ambivert” is that it seeks to evade the conflict by substituting an easy compromise, a reconciliation. “Sure, we need a little bit of both: that’s only reasonable.” But Jung stresses the conflict, because his model of the psyche is dynamic, not static or homeostatic. Out of conflict comes energy, and, as Blake said, “Without Contraries is no progression.” Both love and creativity are born out of wrestling with an otherness, hoping to achieve not victory but a blessing. Fiction writers know that without conflict, there is no story. Essay writers—or newsletter writers—know that without intellectual or thematic conflict, there is no insight, no epiphany. Lovers know about make-up sex, and in a way, all sex is make-up sex.
I am an introvert, and can only write out of the introverted perspective. In fact, I am an extreme introvert. On both the Jungian type tests, the full-length Meyers-Briggs and the abbreviated Keirsey-Bates, my introverted tendencies are something like ten times as strong as my extraverted. I am by nature, in fact, a loner, a recluse. But Jung, with his conflict-model, insists that every psyche contains both opposites. This means that, for an extreme introvert like me, my potential extraversion is repressed into the unconscious. And of course anything repressed becomes capable of all sorts of tricks. One trick is enantiodromia, a term Jung took over from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who also saw life in terms of a dynamic tension of opposites. Enantiodromia is a sudden reversal of opposites that rights an imbalance. Some introverts discover a lifestyle that enables them to live out their extraversion by temporarily adopting another identity. The paradigm is probably acting. The word “persona” originally meant the mask a Greek actor wore when he acted a particular character—including a female character, by the way.
Stand-up comedy is a mode of one-person acting, and comedians are notorious for being saturnine types whose boisterous, extraverted, audience-oriented stage personalities are the opposite of their “real” selves—although they might very well question the word “real.” The self that suddenly appears when the performer walks on stage is just as real as the ordinary personality. It is truly an “alter ego.” When the mother in Tillie Olsen’s great story “I Stand Here Ironing” first goes to see her depressed, introverted daughter perform onstage, she is stunned:
I only recognized her that first moment when thin, shy, she almost drowned herself into the curtains. Then: Was this Emily? The control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives.
The release of my hidden extraverted personality comes through teaching. Someone who only knew my classroom personality might be surprised to hear me describe myself as an introvert. For me—not necessarily for everyone, but for me—teaching is performance art, loud, theatrical, and with more than a dash of improv comedy in it. I hope it does my students some good, because for me it is a wonderful release. I don’t know how many introverts are lucky enough to have some such release: for some people, drinking brings out another personality, but of course that has its potential problems. This is an introvert’s newsletter, but I have some wonderful extravert friends, and I know that something comparable happens with a number of them too, only in reverse. My former student, friend, and colleague Claudine is the kind of extravert whose high-voltage personality could light up not mere rooms but entire stadiums. The word “irrepressible” was surely invented to describe her. Yet in her poetry, which sprang full-blown from her when she was only 20 in my creative writing class, a totally different voice emerges, that of a solitary, darkly detached observer with a mordant humor that often ends the poems with a quick, dry twist. I do not know which personality I value the more: they are both her.
The goal of Jung’s “process of individuation” is not wholeness, which is a godlike quality beyond the human condition, but “completeness,” which is quite different, and involves coming to terms with an imperfect, conflicted, many-sided self. The social model implied by this goal would not only allow but encourage the development of both introversion and extraversion. But any introvert can tell you how American society encourages, and in fact demands extraversion from a young age, and regards introversion as a neurosis to be cured or, failing that, politely repressed. We have become mindful of the gender conditioning of children, but not of their type-conditioning.
This seems to be getting worse rather than better. The relentless scheduling of children’s lives, from soccer practice to cello lessons to play dates, did not exist when I was young, for which I am infinitely thankful. Children need time to be alone, to have time on their hands, to be bored—to be introverted. The enormous appeal of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes derives from the soaring, anti-social and yet vital fantasy life that erupts when Calvin plays by himself. Reading is an introverted activity: for introverted children in a dysfunctional family it can be quite literally lifesaving. Social media are not necessarily evil, but they are necessarily extraverted, and in a society that is already one-sidedly extraverted, they can powerfully encourage unhealthy tendencies. This semester, I taught an essay about smartphones that made a distinction between addictive and obsessive behavior. Addictive behavior is driven by pleasure; obsessive behavior is driven by anxiety. In the writer’s observation, people who compulsively check their phones and spend long hours on them are trying to control anxiety, especially what he calls FOMO, fear of missing out. My students who wrote about this essay tended to have one of two responses. Some very much agreed. Some disagreed, but at times in a tone that was defensive and uneasy.
We also read an essay by Pico Iyer called “Chapels: On the Rewards of Being Quiet,” which begins with a contrast between the experience of standing in Times Square, with enormous screens above and people plugged into their phones below, and the experience of walking out of all that into the silence of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Iyer has actually spent time in monasteries, seeking a respite from the kind of effervescent chaos that extraverts often seek out, and we are reminded that the Middle Ages valued introversion because the kingdom of heaven is within us. In the Divine Comedy, Dante has an allegorical dream on the mountain of Purgatory in which the Old Testament sisters Leah and Rachel represent the Active and Contemplative life respectively. Both are paths to salvation: in the Medici Chapel, Michelangelo depicts the Medici brothers as Active and Contemplative, one alert in a martial stance, looking around him, the other sunk in a pose like that of Rodin’s Thinker. The difference between the outward-looking extravert and the inward-looking introvert could not be dramatized more vividly.
The Bible, like all texts, can be interpreted in an extraverted or an introverted manner. Fundamentalist interpretation is extraverted: the ground of Scripture’s truth is outward, in literal, historical fact, or what is asserted to be fact. To people for whom the extraverted perspective is “normal,” a non-literal reading of Scripture reduces it to subjective fantasies, to vaporous lies that cannot provide the kind of secure foundation that gives fundamentalism its name. This assumption is common not just to far-right American evangelicals but to someone as brilliant as C.S. Lewis. The idea that the reference of the myths and symbols of the Bible, and of Christianity in general, is inward, pointing towards a hidden reality that challenges the claims of outward reality at every point, is generally dismissed as heretical, although it has been held by various groups and theologians over the centuries, culminating in Northrop Frye’s The Great Code. Frye has also challenged the extraverted interpretation of literary texts, whether Marxist, cultural materialist, feminist, or Freudian. Marxist critics never tire of claiming that Frye wants to run away from history and take refuge in some quasi-Platonic neverland, instead of engaging the world and its injustices. The idea that literature shows an imaginatively decreated and recreated world different from external reality but with an authority of its own is usually condemned as the escapism of bourgeois privilege, as positing a kind of internal gated community available only to the elite. It used to be that the four years of college were at least somewhat modeled on the monastic experience of isolation conducive to deeper contemplation. It was perhaps always more an ideal than a reality, but for a century the “ivory tower” model of education in the United States has been subjected to repeated onslaughts of the extraverted ideal of being active. Students should always be busy, involved; education should be experiential; assessment is supposed to show what students are able to do at the end of their academic career. A good number of students like this, but some of the best students would love to return to the traditional model, in which college life consisted largely of reading books, discussing them, thinking about them, and writing about them. I have been told by at least one Academic Dean that this is a hopelessly old-fashioned idea, although that does not represent the view of my university as a whole.
In literature, the genre of the utopia provides ideal social models. Most utopias are not intended to be taken as actual blueprints to be realized by social action but are aids to thinking, test case scenarios helping us to work out the implications of various social possibilities. But all the utopias seem to have been designed by extraverts, so that living in some of them would be for an introvert a living hell. In the first place, utopias tend to be collectivistic rather than individualistic. In modern times, since the 19th century, this was often a reflexive attempt to counterbalance the kind of false individualism increasingly evident in the more predatory forms of capitalism. But it led to descriptions of communal living whose gregariousness would eventually exhaust most introverts. Kim Stanley Robinson sees the problem and tries to address it in my favorite utopia, Pacific Edge (1990). The kind of communal lifestyle he portrays in fact amounts to a kind of non-biological version of the old extended family, and he notes that it would be a blessing for parents for whom the nuclear family model means a serious problem with childcare. It also makes a place for the introvert loner, Tomas, who almost never appears in the story because he is always upstairs shut away at his computer. Except one time, when the protagonist Kevin is emotionally wounded in a serious way and no one else is home—and Tomas is instantly by his side, providing support and company. It is a moving scene. But the introvert in the attic points to an issue.
Another danger of collectivist anti-individualism is a leveling down to a least common denominator through rejecting any type of achievement or aspiration as a temptation to a narcissistic will to power. It is strange to see Cory Doctorow’s super-hip, super-intelligent utopia Walkaway (2017) espousing a kind of slacker mentality in order to fight back against the tendency to apotheosize megalomaniacal entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs. One character thinks,
You weren’t supposed to be a special snowflake, because the objective reality was that, important as you were to yourself and the people immediately around you, it was unlikely that anything you did was irreplaceable. As soon as you classed yourself as a special snowflake, you headed for the self-delusional belief that you should have more than everyone else, because your snowflakiness demanded it. If there was one thing that was utterly uncool in walkaway, it was that self-delusion.
This character tells another, “There have been one hundred billion humans on the planet over the years, and statistically, most of them didn’t make a difference. The anthropocene is about collective action, not individuals.” This is the view of a character, and not necessarily the book’s ultimate conclusion. But it defines a utopian problem, the problem of distinguishing individualism from mere self-centeredness. The great utopia that has placed this problem at the center of its discussion is Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, whose protagonist, Shevek, really is a special snowflake. Shevek is not just brilliant: he is a paradigm-changing genius on the order of an Einstein—and his collectivist society’s usual attitude to his genius is that he is “egoizing.” And the irony is that he has none of the megalomania of a Musk or a Jobs. The problem of the gifted individual is not just an issue of introversion versus extraversion, but it remains true that extraverts are group-oriented while introverts like Shevek go their own way, and are distrusted because of it.
Another thing that extraverts may not understand about introverts has to do with possessions. In many utopias, including Walkaway and The Dispossessed, the desire for possessions is at least one root of all evil. All things are shared, and if you lose something or it is stolen, you get another or decide you didn’t really need it after all. You should not be attached to things. There is a failure to understand about the introverted desire to collect, however. It is not always, or not necessarily, about either greed or status. I sit writing, surrounded by my collections of books, music, and guitars. Whatever the collectivists say, these are not symptoms of some bourgeois hoarding mentality. None of the collections have any real monetary value: the books are reading copies, the guitars inexpensive. But they are part of my identity: this house is an ark in which I have loaded what truly matters to me, and, if the deluge comes, I will have saved what I find precious. This is one form of the introvert’s need to create a temenos, a charmed circle that not only wards off an encroaching exterior world but creates a warm matrix of inclusion within. In fact, in the last two years, the deluge did come. My intellectual and artistic life was very little disrupted by lockdown, when books were not even available through interlibrary loan because there was no one to staff the research libraries. But usually I had my own copy of any book I needed.
What would an introverted utopia look like? It would begin with the need for the right kind of solitude. Its motto would be the famous lines from Marvell’s ”The Garden”: Two paradises ‘twere in one / To live in paradise alone.” An ironic inversion of the theme is Sartre’s play No Exit, with its famous line, “Hell is other people.” Sometimes it as, as for people trapped in lockdown with no escape from others, however dysfunctional or even abusive those others were. In Plant Dreaming Deep and Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton created her own introvert’s utopia, living a creative life alone in a house in New Hampshire. But we do have one introverted utopia by a writer more famous than Sarton: Thoreau’s Walden.
It is not a perfect example, in my opinion, flawed by the usual puritanical distrust of possessions. But Thoreau does have his books with him, including the Bhagavad-Gita, which can be described as a debate in Eastern terms over the merits of the active and the contemplative life.
The Internet’s exacerbation of herd mentality is obvious, but it has other possibilities. The divide in popular music is greater than ever. Pop music seems ever more extraverted, seeking ever bigger crowds, ever greater spectacle. Its introverted opposite is a folk singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar. But Patreon and other forms of crowd-funding, as well as YouTube and house concerts, have actually helped some of the singer-songwriters and other niche acts carve out careers independent of the tyranny of the big labels seeking mega-hits. And instead of acquiring an agent and begging big publishers for a book contract, you can self-publish. Newsletters are recreating the kind of conditions out of which the familiar essay grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, and podcasts are in some ways like a return to the great old days of radio, for the spoken word is a relatively introverted medium compared to the visual hypnosis of television. Yes, I am aware that in every case the issue is money. All I am saying is that the vehicles are there, if we can change the economy enough to make use of them.
If we were trying to move our own society in an introvertedly utopian direction, what steps might we take? An obvious first step would be to stop pathologizing introversion: stop trying to cure it the way that people used to try to cure homosexuality. We might take a closer look at the few niches in society where introversion is accepted as normal: IT, for example, is densely populated by highly intelligent introverts, accommodated because their skills are necessary, a fact that even control-freak CEOs are forced to accept. Second, we should stop thinking of introversion as the means to an essentially extraverted end, like the self-help books that tell would-be execs to add it to their tool kit for business reasons. Third, we should try much harder to understand the difference between true introversion and the kind of narcissism that is often described as an extreme individualism. It is really not individualism at all. Narcissists have no sense of internal identity, no idea that there is anything inside themselves. Their identity comes from outside: they see their reflection in others, as in a mirror. That is why they are ridiculously thin-skinned—think “Donald Trump.” Fourth, we could encourage and help make it possible for people to live double lives, with double identities. Instead of telling young people they should not major in the humanities, we should begin making a place for them where they might hold their own or even outperform the extraverts if they could only get their foot in the door. And extraverts need time out, even if many of them would resist it and claim they get very restless and anxious if they are alone with nothing to do for more than five minutes. They need to learn how to look inward for personal reasons, not in order to become more successful. The safe response to such suggestions is cynical dismissal: none of it will ever happen, don’t be naïve. But, as listeners to my podcast know, one of the great themes of the Odyssey is, be careful of what stories you do not believe.
Finally, introversion depends on leisure, and the pace of modern life needs to be drastically slowed down, even if some people are addicted to a high-speed, high-pressure lifestyle as to cocaine. Both introverts and extraverts need leisure, need the kind of peace and serenity in which they may loaf and invite their soul. In the end, we may find that such inner peace is the kingdom of heaven that Jesus spoke of, a peace in which introverts and extraverts may join hands and hearts because it is a state in which there is no inner or outer, only a here and now that are transient, yet somehow eternal.