Goodreads Bookshelf
The people around us
posted Wednesday, 24 January 2007
Tonight on NPR's On Point program, Susan Cheever talks about her book and research on the Transcendentalists, who my juniors have been reluctantly studying, talking specifically about how they lived around one another in Concord, MA, how they influenced one another and interacted with one another. In essence, Ralph Waldo Emerson married a wealthy young woman who he seems to have loved very well, but she died young and he ended up suing--and winning his suit--against her parents to inherit her portion of the family fortune. With this money, he bought the house in which he lived in Concord (which is still there, now as an excellent historical place dedicated to these folks), and more or less intentionally pulled together brilliant people. Thoreau spent years actually living with Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott lived nearby, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who was decidedly not a transcendentalist) rented from Emerson, and there are a few other names most of us don't know. It was a so-called genius cluster.
The thing that's come up for me in several different guises lately is how people influence each other in a group. What if, for instance, all of these people had been born in disparate parts of our country--or in other countries--and never gotten together. It seems reasonable to think that at least some of them would be completely unknown, either because they wouldn't have done the things they did or because they wouldn't have done them so well without the influence of the others. It is, of course, a completely academic question, but there's something to it.
I think along similar lines when I look at football, what a team would be like with one particular player more or less--would players that we consider "great" still be great if they had a different team around them, or a different coach, or even a different coach back in high school or college? We see players with apparently great talent come to the NFL and flop on a semi-regular basis. Are they as bad as we think, or do they just lack the right coaching at a particular time or one key player at another position? Would Tom Brady be the god-like Tom Brady if he had been drafted by the Arizona Cardinals, or would he be completely nameless at this point, a 6th rounder who never got a shot or didn't succeed when he did? Would Akili Smith have found success if someone better than the Bengals in terms of coaching and players had drafted him (well, probably not, he was just plain overhyped)? You see my point, though? We look at people who seem incredibly successful, and while some of that is clearly them, some of it seems also clearly to have been their context--likewise with failures.
Or look at it another way. As a teacher, I see several classrooms full of students each year. I have had 41 distinct classes so far in my teaching career, to say nothing of conducting 14 distinct choirs and overseeing dorms full of groups of boys. Each one of these groups has its own collective personality, and it's fascinating to see how the individual personalities combine in different ways. For instance, at my old school a colleague had a class that was a nightmare. The students were easily distracted and extremely difficult to handle; ask him who the problem students were and he could rattle off a handful of names for you. In fact, I had one of those students in another class--a dream class. For me, that same student was diligent and hard-working. Now, I don't claim that this behavior was due in any way to particular things that I or my colleague were doing; instead, it had everything to do with context. In my class, this student was surrounded by intelligent, hard-working students, which brought out his own intelligent and diligent side. My colleague, by contrast, had this student in a context with several other "difficult" students.
We have a popular myth in our culture that a person is a completely consistent collection of characteristics (I'll call it the match.com fallacy--list off my beliefs on certain things, my personality traits, all sorts of details, and that's me). In fact, I think Orson Scott Card has it right in his introduction to the newer edition of Speaker for the Dead when he talks about how "in real life, at least, most people change, at least subtly when they are with different people.... So when a storyteller has to create three characters, each different relationship requires that each character in it must be transformed, however subtly, depending on how the relationship is shaping his or her present identity." Experience suggests to me that this is true--undeniably true.
I do not, however, know exactly how this apparent truth is entirely useful. From a personal standpoint, it might suggest that we should work to surround ourselves with good people--that is, people who elicit from us our best selves, people who actively or passively encourage us to be the person we actually want to be. Even that doesn't seem quite accurate: once we've reached this point of self-awareness, we can presumably be who we want to be ourselves. Still, people who help that are good, and equally good are people who help us to be even better than we expect ourselves to be (understand that "better" here is ultimately a very individual judgment--what's "better" for me might not be better for you). In some ways, I think this is one of the things our on-line communities do for us--we present ourselves in certain ways that reflect how we think of ourselves as being most "true" and on the basis of this we end up being read largely by people who do support that vision of ourselves, and we read others who in some ways encourage us to be the selves we desire to be. I don't mean that we necessarily read just people who agree with us, but we tend to read people who support and challenge us in particular ways which are agreeable to ourselves: these are the communities we create here.
The thing that's come up for me in several different guises lately is how people influence each other in a group. What if, for instance, all of these people had been born in disparate parts of our country--or in other countries--and never gotten together. It seems reasonable to think that at least some of them would be completely unknown, either because they wouldn't have done the things they did or because they wouldn't have done them so well without the influence of the others. It is, of course, a completely academic question, but there's something to it.
I think along similar lines when I look at football, what a team would be like with one particular player more or less--would players that we consider "great" still be great if they had a different team around them, or a different coach, or even a different coach back in high school or college? We see players with apparently great talent come to the NFL and flop on a semi-regular basis. Are they as bad as we think, or do they just lack the right coaching at a particular time or one key player at another position? Would Tom Brady be the god-like Tom Brady if he had been drafted by the Arizona Cardinals, or would he be completely nameless at this point, a 6th rounder who never got a shot or didn't succeed when he did? Would Akili Smith have found success if someone better than the Bengals in terms of coaching and players had drafted him (well, probably not, he was just plain overhyped)? You see my point, though? We look at people who seem incredibly successful, and while some of that is clearly them, some of it seems also clearly to have been their context--likewise with failures.
Or look at it another way. As a teacher, I see several classrooms full of students each year. I have had 41 distinct classes so far in my teaching career, to say nothing of conducting 14 distinct choirs and overseeing dorms full of groups of boys. Each one of these groups has its own collective personality, and it's fascinating to see how the individual personalities combine in different ways. For instance, at my old school a colleague had a class that was a nightmare. The students were easily distracted and extremely difficult to handle; ask him who the problem students were and he could rattle off a handful of names for you. In fact, I had one of those students in another class--a dream class. For me, that same student was diligent and hard-working. Now, I don't claim that this behavior was due in any way to particular things that I or my colleague were doing; instead, it had everything to do with context. In my class, this student was surrounded by intelligent, hard-working students, which brought out his own intelligent and diligent side. My colleague, by contrast, had this student in a context with several other "difficult" students.
We have a popular myth in our culture that a person is a completely consistent collection of characteristics (I'll call it the match.com fallacy--list off my beliefs on certain things, my personality traits, all sorts of details, and that's me). In fact, I think Orson Scott Card has it right in his introduction to the newer edition of Speaker for the Dead when he talks about how "in real life, at least, most people change, at least subtly when they are with different people.... So when a storyteller has to create three characters, each different relationship requires that each character in it must be transformed, however subtly, depending on how the relationship is shaping his or her present identity." Experience suggests to me that this is true--undeniably true.
I do not, however, know exactly how this apparent truth is entirely useful. From a personal standpoint, it might suggest that we should work to surround ourselves with good people--that is, people who elicit from us our best selves, people who actively or passively encourage us to be the person we actually want to be. Even that doesn't seem quite accurate: once we've reached this point of self-awareness, we can presumably be who we want to be ourselves. Still, people who help that are good, and equally good are people who help us to be even better than we expect ourselves to be (understand that "better" here is ultimately a very individual judgment--what's "better" for me might not be better for you). In some ways, I think this is one of the things our on-line communities do for us--we present ourselves in certain ways that reflect how we think of ourselves as being most "true" and on the basis of this we end up being read largely by people who do support that vision of ourselves, and we read others who in some ways encourage us to be the selves we desire to be. I don't mean that we necessarily read just people who agree with us, but we tend to read people who support and challenge us in particular ways which are agreeable to ourselves: these are the communities we create here.
Your comments, as always, are most welcome. (2)