The Launching of the Ambivert Liberation Front: A Cheerful Call to Action
While I would be reluctant to call myself a “sucker,” there is no denying that I am an enthusiast for group dynamics, as portrayed in the cartoon that appears on this banner. And so, when I contemplate the merry group celebrating something-or-other, I feel almost certain that I would enjoy their company.
More to the point, I believe I have enjoyed their company (or company very much like it). In these times of social isolation, I savor memories of joining in dances without dignity or decorum, with very loud music inspiring ever more outlandish gyrations. As I know from those memories, this unleashing of exuberance can sometimes earn condemnation from melancholy souls who can see public expressions of joy as a downturn in civilization. In truth, appraised by those folks, unrestrained merriment can register as derangement.
Fortunately, with the music at the right volume, those of us dancing as if there were no tomorrow would not be able to hear any such condemnation.
But the cartoon raises a much more important topic than the occasional disapproval of festive “group dynamics.”
If we were to take my first response to this cartoon—”Make room for me!”—to be the only data point that could reveal my character, then we would be likely to categorize me as an extrovert.
But if we were to leap to that conclusion, we would soon be taking a long walk back to a better-grounded judgment.
So let’s not leap.
Instead, let’s add an additional data point.
If, in real life (as opposed to “imagining myself in a cartoon” life), I came upon a group of revelers like this one, and I did not recognize any of them, I would not join them. I might wish that I knew them, and I might even wish that they would invite me to join them. But I would not have any inclination to intrude on strangers.
(A side note for 2021: In this imagined scenario, there is no coronavirus, and so the fact that the dancing people were not wearing masks would not be a concern.)
But back to the point: if these people were strangers to me, I would not make eye contact, and I would walk away from them, heading to a place where the sounds of their rowdiness would fade into the distance. I would say to myself, “It is lucky that I have a book with me.” And then I would sit quietly by myself and read for a while.
This would make for an extraordinarily dull cartoon, with the dullness enhanced by the caption, “I’m a sucker for a good book.”
But if we were to take this scene as our one data point, and especially if we could hear, at a distance, music and shouts from the dancing people who I could not join, we would be likely to categorize me as an introvert.
And then there is a third line of thought to consider: why categorize me at all?
If there were a competition for the two clunkiest, clumsiest, and least eloquent terms available to categorize human character, “extrovert” and “introvert” would be the hands-down winners. Those two words are breathtakingly unmelodious and stunningly unevocative.
When I learned that “vert” meant “turn” in Latin, I was momentarily cheered. The terms were literally rooted in the capacity to “turn,” suggesting that extroverts could turn outward, and introverts could turn inward, and having turned one way, they could just as easily turn back the other way. Why, they could even turn to face each other and to recognize their relationship and even their kinship! But there is little evidence that the people who rely on these terms pay attention to the fact that turning—the capability to change directions and to shift orientation—is built into their foundation. Quite the contrary: getting classified as an introvert or as an extrovert is far more often understood as lifetime condition, with no turning permitted.
Ambivert, the word coined to acknowledge that the same person can be both introvert and extrovert, does not offer much in the way of escape from linguistic misfortune. It is unquestionably the clunkiest and clumsiest of the three terms. And yet it is the term I am stuck with as I present the rallying cry for the 2021 launching of the Ambivert Liberation Front:
Ambiverts of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but a doubtful psychological theory that has, for too long, served as a self-fulfilling prophecy to constrict human choice and the exercise of free will!
Well, OK, so the Ambivert Liberation Front needs to work a little harder on the crafting of its rallying cry.
But momentarily putting aside the advocacy for ambiverts, we must turn to our assignment for the day—which, in case you were wondering, is “The reconsideration of habits of mind that have been thrown into disorder and disrepair over the last ten months.”
Making The Most of the Lessons That Have Come to Us at a Terrible Price
Ten months ago, we were all recruited as unwilling participants in an enormous and unprecedented social psychology experiment. In ordinary experiments, people who will be subjects in research are to receive information about the research, and they must provide informed consent before they participate.
Since March of 2020, without signing a single form to convey our permission, we have been subjected to a cascade of over-wrought tests that—if they had not been put into operation by the arrival of a virus—could never have made it through the review procedures and protocols that protect human subjects from cruel experimentation.
And so, for nearly a year, we have all been contributing to the generation of a flood of data from a society-wide experiment. What should we do to make the most of that cascade of findings?
We have to start by reckoning with the terrible price that many among us have paid for these findings.
Many among us face financial hardship through unemployment or the collapse of small businesses. Many others confront suffering, loss, death, and grief. Some of us are living each day with fear. Some people, who were adding vitality and meaning to our world, have ceased to live at all.
At the same time, a great many of us have experienced much more in the way of inconvenience and vexation than serious trouble. Those of us who have gotten off light have been rightly reluctant to speak about our circumstances; our troubles have been trivial, and we do not want to risk seeming to dismiss the burdens that have fallen on so many others.
And yet the best way to live with this disparity is to invest our remaining time on earth in the cause of harvesting whatever we can in the way of value and meaning from the burdens that have fallen so hard on so many.
People have paid an enormous price for the lessons that we are now obligated to identify, to study, and to use to guide our conduct. In other words, we are obligated to make the most of the curriculum that has come to us at an unfathomable price.
These lessons—that is, the findings generated by the enormous social psychology experiment in which we have all been involved—center on this proposition: human beings are capable of a lot more change than we realized a year ago.
We all are living in ways we would never have imagined.
Arising from tragedy, that new reality is saturated with promise.
Before the pandemic, a powerful strain of conventional wisdom held to the proposition that people are almost incapable of change after they reach a certain age. And, indeed, with the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy, people’s chances of changing were much diminished by being told that this was impossible.
A related track of conventional wisdom held that individuals carry intrinsic character traits that persist from the beginning to the end of their lives.
But the results from the nationwide social psychology experiment of the last ten months have undermined conventional wisdom. The idea that people cannot change has lost its power to convince.
The implications of this transformation reach into every dimension of our lives. In this “Not my First Rodeo” post, I am going to focus on an aspect which is by no means the most important.
I have purposefully chosen a topic that can arouse intense feelings in some sectors of society, but (to the best of my knowledge) has never figured in the bitterness of partisan politics and bears no relationship to the usual arrangements of conservative and liberal, left and right, in political alignments.
Here is the proposition I want to explore: Lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing have called into question the widespread assumption that humanity is divided between people who are intrinsically and lastingly extroverts and people who are intrinsically and lastingly introverts.
Since I retain the license to violate my own confidence with abandon, without having to fill out a form giving myself permission to ask myself prying personal questions, I am going to take up the reckoning with the vast social psychology experiment in the last ten months by using myself as a volunteer specimen.
And I invite everyone to read this testimony critically and skeptically.
Is my reaction to the pandemic representative of experiences shared by many others, or is it idiosyncratic? Does my story represent a widespread pattern, or is it the story of a one-of-a-kind, very odd bird? To put this without subtlety: am I normal or abnormal?
Those are not questions to which I have an answer. Instead, with a very modest appraisal of the value and persuasiveness of the lessons I draw from my own experience, I will conclude with reflections on one particular lesson brought to our attention by the enormous social psychology experiment in which we have all been participants.
The Origins of an Ambivert
I arrived on the planet before the term introvert had taken hold in popular culture, so the term used for my character was shy.
(Even that mild-mannered statement could invite me into a zone of dispute, an invitation I will, for now, turn down. I am well aware that, in recent times, much effort has been invested in declarations that shy is not a synonym for introverted, with the claim that introverted is the technical term for having the need to “recharge one’s battery” in solitude. In spite of those declarations, it is still my impression that shy remains the default meaning of introverted in public usage.)
Throughout my childhood, when my parents and big sisters set out to visit people, my characteristic response was, “Why don’t I just stay home and read?”
This never worked, but I never gave up trying.
One great advantage of my failure to prevail, in assertions of shyness, was that more –in the way of respect and concern for other people—was asked of me than I would have offered on my own. When I was dragged along on these social outings, we often visited lonely people. I could not miss the fact that our presence had a cheering impact on the people who found us on their doorstep.
And that may be my main point in this whole “Rodeo” blog post: I was given a route out of shyness because I was regularly called out from self-preoccupation. To use terms that figure in religious belief and in professional life, I found myself—initially very much against my will—with a calling or a vocation.
Veering wildly around in chronology, I will note the obvious: my early exposure to a calling and a vocation that summoned me out of shyness and self-preoccupation is the bedrock reason why the Center of the American West succeeded. The wonderful co-founder of the Center, noted CU Law Professor Charles Wilkinson, steered the Center into being. As he returned to his crucial work on behalf of the well-being of the public lands and the support of Indian sovereignty, and I moved into the role of Faculty Director, the Center succeeded in large part because, in Banning, California, my parents could never have conjured up the idea that I was intrinsically and innately an introvert and would have to be treated as such. They thought I was shy and so they (and nearly everyone else in that small town!) kept calling me out of self-preoccupation.
Although I have long been grateful for the training program that has benefited me beyond any estimation, I only learned what to call it on Friday, February 5, 2021.
Gumption Training
As regular readers of “Not my First Rodeo” know, providence has been very kind in introducing me to extraordinary young people. I offer what I can in the way of guidance and insight to these folks, and, good heavens, do they ever reciprocate in kind!
The italicized passage that follows was written by the extraordinary Alice Baumgartner, who spent a year at the Center of the American West and who is now an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California. In a phone conversation last Friday, she introduced me to the term “gumption training.” When I asked to know more, she conducted an oral history investigation, which produced a wonderful story about her grandfather, John Coath, and his wisdom in raising a child who, like me but for different reasons, seemed headed toward a life of shyness.
Here are Alice’s words:
It turns out that my late grandfather invented “gumption training” for one of my aunts, who, as the fourth of eight children, had gotten too accustomed to all of her siblings bossing her around. So he made her “order in a loud, clear voice at restaurants and go get his newspaper for him from the store.” The training worked (in the words of my aunt today: “I’m a very decisive orderer at restaurants.”). My aunt doesn’t know how her father had come up with the term, but since he had a whole lexicon of invented words that he liked to use, like “matrimonial fruit basket” (baby carriage) and “give-in-ish” (adjective to describe pushovers), I’m not surprised he was the originator of “gumption training.”
My grandfather would be delighted that “gumption training” was gaining traction beyond our immediate family. You are more than welcome to use my name and my grandfather’s (John Coath). I feel very fortunate to have had gumption training, and the more kiddos who are spared the coddling that some parents seem to favor, the better!
With her own reasons for shyness (ungainly large glasses, and even, for a time, an eyepatch to retrain a “lazy eye”), Alice joins me and her aunt as beneficiaries of the good fortune packed into the term, “gumption training.” As a tribute to Alice’s grandfather and to my own parents, I record the hope that their creative and effective answer to the omnipresent question—“How to do the right thing on behalf of shy children?”—will offer promise and possibility to many.
Back to the Findings Of The 2020-2021 Vast Social Psychology Experiment:
A Fable of Our Times
(Weirdly Written in the Third Person)
Once upon a time, there was a person who seemed to be the ultimate extrovert. In everyday life, she had an incurable habit of striking up a conversation with anyone who appeared in her proximity in restaurants or waiting rooms, in grocery store check-out lines or airport security lines, or even when standing at an intersection and waiting for the light to change. In every encounter with a person she did not know, she began with the confidence that she and the stranger were about to discover an abundance of shared beliefs and common interests. The outcome was consistent: she found something she treasured in nearly everyone she met.
After years of teaching, she had students stationed throughout the country, forming a network that frequently produced unexpected encounters and reunions, as well as email messages that appeared out of nowhere. Intertwined with professional colleagues in many locales, this network gave her almost daily opportunities to invoke the phrase, “Small world!” Her addiction to public speaking offered further evidence for her status as the ultimate extrovert. When she was placed at a podium in front of an audience, she was exuberant and exhilarated. Even better, giving speeches often involved travel to places where she met new people and reunited with old friends; the social whirl of conversation at breakfast, lunch, and dinner proved as enjoyable as giving the speeches. At the end of each speaking trip, she was sad to depart but determined to return. And, then, most recently, with the support of a major foundation, she had been given the resources to bring talented young scholars to visit the town where she lived, where she could immerse herself in their company and do whatever she could to encourage their future success.
We interrupt this fable to raise a question that seems like it will have an obvious answer: What will become of this person when her life is transformed by the era of lockdown, quarantine, remote working, the cessation of travel, and an indefinite pause in the satisfaction of sharing ideas in rooms densely populated with responsive and good-natured people?
The effect of these transformations on the person we have taken to be the ultimate extrovert should be easy to predict: she will disintegrate; she will lose her bearings; she will be unable to recharge her batteries without the energizing in-person presence of her fellow human beings.
Guess again.
She didn’t collapse.
She adapted.
And, when it came to adaptation, here was her ace in the hole: contrary to appearances, she was not, in fact, the ultimate extrovert.
Why, after all, did she like public speaking so much?
Entering a social gathering where she knew no one, she felt—as any sensible person would feel—shy and out-of-place. But if she gave a speech, everything changed. Thanks to her time at the podium, the burden of introducing herself to strangers had lifted from her shoulders, and people took it upon themselves to approach her to talk. Whether they agreed or disagreed or couldn’t make head or tail of what she had said in her speech, they introduced themselves and told her what was on their minds.
Rather than the ultimate extrovert, she had a strong streak of shyness from childhood on, and that streak never went entirely dormant. When the pandemic brought conditions where she spent more time in her own company, she did not have to become a new person. All she had to do was to take advantage of well-established traits and habits that had been central to her character for decades.
Over the last ten months, the purity of this experiment was compromised by email, phone calls, and, most of all, Zoom conversations. And yet here is a revealing fact: with the stimulation of these technologically supported exchanges, she often ended the day with a sensation that could be summed up as “Whew! That’ll do it for now.” In the evenings, she gained a better sense of what had always befuddled her when introverts tried to convince her of their intrinsic character.
Overloaded with stimulating exchanges during the days, the evenings gave a glimpse of what it could mean to “recharge one’s “battery” in solitude.
Another Sort of Fable:
The Turtle, the Peacock, and the Reversal of Stereotypes
In this cartoon, the reversal of stereotypes drives the humor. The massive social psychology experiment of 2020-2021 offers a strangely similar reversal of stereotypes.
We think we know that the peacock (Bernie!) will be an extrovert, but he is actually an introvert. We think we know that the turtle will be an introvert, but she is actually an extrovert. (We have no expectations of the seal, though he is obviously a good listener.)
Goofy as the cartoon is, its reversal of our expectations is profound and promising.
If we could spend more time with the peacock and the turtle (which would surely be a pleasure), their complexity would be revealed as we came to know them in different settings, situations, and contexts. We would have the chance to see that some situations make the turtle deeply uncomfortable, sometimes to the point that she falls silent and withdraws her head into her shell. We would have the chance to see that some situations induce the peacock to relax, raise his head with well-deserved self-esteem, and parade around, at peace with the fact that his feathers brighten the world. For all we know, this might have been the peacock’s first encounter with a seal, and there is a chance that once he got better acquainted with a creature who initially seemed so entirely “other,” he’d give the turtle a run for her money as an outgoing conversationalist.
To sum up this cartoon’s powerful advocacy for the Ambivert Liberation Front, further observation would reveal that the peacock is not consistently an introvert, and the turtle is not consistently an extrovert. More important, even as their character traits fluctuate and vary, the two of them have found a way of saying to each other, “We are not exactly birds of a feather (or reptiles of similar shells), but we have come to enjoy each other’s company.”
Both the peacock and the turtle would turn out to be ambiverts, shifting character type according to their circumstances.
I speak with conviction and expertise on this subject, since I may be one of the most ambiverted creatures on earth.
Mobilizing a Famous, if Awkwardly Delivered, Exhortation:
“Loosen Up!”
Years ago, at the famous Washington Press Club dinner, where improbable seating arrangements were the norm, the football player John Riggins was seated next to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In his usual manner, Riggins accepted every beverage he was offered. After a conversation that did not really take off, gravity took over, and John Riggins ended the evening sleeping under a chair on the floor. But before this descent, he famously said to Justice O’Connor, “Loosen up, Sandy baby.”
Well, with far less ingestion of beverages, and leaving Justice O’Connor out of it, that’s more or less my point: it’s time to draw the lessons from the enormous social psychology experiment of the last ten months, and “loosen up” on a proportionately enormous range of rigid distinctions that have been structured for too long as “either/or” pairings.
When the famed psychologist Carl Jung cooked up the classifications of the “extrovert” and “introvert,” he saw these two characterizations of temperament as identities on a spectrum, coexisting in individuals, and shifting according to situations. It was never his idea that they would be seen as innate, permanent, and unchangeable. But this pattern—by which ideas come into the world with flexibility and then got locked into rigidity—has occurred in many arenas of human life, with results that constrain adaptability and choice.
So this, I believe, would be Carl Jung’s response if he knew what had become of those two terms he introduced into our world:
Loosen up, introverts and extroverts! Loosen up!
“These Days, Even Extroverts Feel Awkward”
Headline, The New York Times, December 20, 2020
This is the headline that called attention to an article by a writer named Bob Morris. Though this was not his intention, what Morris wrote turned out to convince me that my experience over the last months is more typical and representative than it is idiosyncratic and eccentric. As the subtitle of Morris’s article declared, “Months of limited mingling can have a big effect on social people,” leading them to feel—on the rare occasions when they see other people—like “eighth graders attending a school dance for the first time.” And yet, even as Morris tells stories of outgoing people who have declined from “social atrophy,” that headline announcing his article proclaims a loyalty to the outmoded idea that extroversion is an inherent character trait.
Time to let that go.
With isolation and distancing, the supposedly intrinsic and permanent character traits of introversion and extroversion have been scrambled and even merged. The people long stereotyped as extroverts have had the chance to become acquainted with a paradox they might otherwise have missed: solitude resisted can be miserable and grim; solitude embraced can deepen the privilege of being alive.
Here is a restatement of my hypothesis.
The results of the enormous social psychology experiment, brought into operation by the pandemic, challenge the widespread belief that a process, in which nature and nurture reinforce each other, designates some humans as extroverts and some humans as introverts. Put people through a strenuous, society-wide experiment in social psychology, and the results reveal that these theoretically opposed character types coexist—both within individuals and in society at large.
Affirmations of this hypothesis appear in multiple forms. Reports about the impact of isolation, in escalating a sense of loneliness and a yearning for the chance to be in the company of other people, do not draw a distinction between extroverts and introverts. There are few reports of a sizable sector of the population celebrating the enormous relief delivered by not having, to use the orthodox figure of speech among the orthodox, their “batteries” drained by human company. Susan Cain, probably the most influential advocate for introverts, has claimed that introverts compose one-third to one-half of the American population. If one-third to one-half of the Americans feel relieved and liberated by quarantine and lockdown, they have orchestrated a successful strategy to steer clear of attempted intrusions into and invasions of their privacy by reporters and researchers.
As Bob Morris declares in his New York Times article, we are all socially awkward now. But he stops short of recognizing that this shared awkwardness is not a recent onset. Some of us had just made greater, if temporary, progress at performing with ease in social situations.
We are all ambiverts now, at once disconcerted and liberated by the changes that have brought our similarity out of concealment.
Comrades in the Ambivert Liberation Front, contemplate the cartoon you will find below, and take it as a cautionary tale.
In a full-speed-ahead confirmation of a stereotype, the extrovert has, of course, shown up. The fellow seated in the middle is presumably the ambivert, who has organized this forum but who has performed very poorly in persuading the introvert to attend.
Fellow ambiverts, here is the lesson the cartoon offers to you: As you launch your movement, be gracious to the people who have found an otherwise elusive peace and self-understanding in the terms introvert and extrovert. Figure out a way to make sure that those people feel fully invited—ideally, even called—to speak for themselves in the in-person forums of the post-pandemic future.
Ambiverts of the world, unite with as much grace and good nature as you can muster, and come up with a better name and a better slogan.
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