Dont Forget About Shy People

Don't forget about shy people Being shy is normal and can actually be an advantage because it allows for the introspection that leads to creative breakthroughs, argues author Joe Moran. This cuts against centuries of thinkers suggesting that people who are noticeably shy have social, moral or physical problems. The Atlantic online The Case for Shyness Joe Moran’s book Shrinking Violets is a sweeping history that doubles as a (quiet) defense of timidity. Lefteris Pitarakis / AP MEGAN GARBER FEB 20, 2017 TEXT SIZE The Heimlich maneuver, in the nearly 50 years since Dr. Henry Heimlich established its protocol, has been credited with saving many lives. But not, perhaps, as many as it might have. The maneuver, otherwise so wonderfully simple to execute, has a marked flaw: It requires that choking victims, before anything can be done to help them, first alert other people to the fact that they are choking. And some people, it turns out, are extremely reluctant to do so. “Sometimes,” Dr. Heimlich noted, bemoaning how easily human nature can become a threat to human life, “a victim of choking becomes embarrassed by his predicament and succeeds in getting up and leaving the area unnoticed.” If no one happens upon him, “he will die or suffer permanent brain damage within seconds.” Something bad is happening; don’t let other people see it; you will embarrass yourself, and them: It’s an impulse that is thoroughly counterproductive and also incredibly easy to understand. Self-consciousness is a powerful thing. And there are, after all, even in the most frantic and fearful of moments, so many things that will seem preferable to making a scene. Shyness, that single emotion that encompasses so many different things— embarrassment, timidity, a fear of rejection, a reluctance to be inconvenient—is, despite its extreme commonality, also extremely mysterious. Is it a mere feeling? A personality-defining condition? A form of anxiety? While shyness is for some a constant companion, its flushes and flashes managed in the rough manner of a chronic disease, it can also alight, without the courtesy of a warning, on even the most social, and socially graceful, of people. It can manifest as the mute smile that appears, unbidden, when you’re alone with a stranger in an elevator. Or as, right before the curtain goes up, the leaden stomach and the clammy hands and the desperate desire to escape to someplace—any place—that is not the stage. Or it can come when the bite of chicken didn’t go down quite right, and your throat is closing, and the world is spinning, and everyone is watching, and all you want to do is get away from it all. Shyness, basically, is an inconsiderate monster. Or, as the cultural historian Joe Moran argues in his wonderful new book, Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness, it is an inconsiderate monster that has been a reliable, if largely invisible, companion to human history. Today, in the United States, shyness is often associated with a broad jumble of related and overlapping conditions, from occasional timidness to general awkwardness, from stage fright to the DSM-recognized social anxiety disorder. This imprecision is, it turns out, fitting: Shyness isn’t a single situation or character, Moran suggests, but, instead, a regular but also irregular interloper in human affairs, affecting people across ages and countries and cultures. Shyness can be, sometimes, a curse. It can be, as Dr. Heimlich acknowledged, occasionally a deadly one. Shyness isn’t a single situation or character, but rather an irregular interloper in human affairs. But shyness can also be, Moran argues, a great gift, its impulse toward introversion allowing for the inventive thinking and creative genius that might elude the more talkatively inclined. Shrinking Violets is a sweeping work of history and anthropology and sociology, summoning Simmel and Seneca and Sontag in its exploration of diffidence; it is also, more simply, a series of short biographies of shyness and those who have lived, to varying degrees, under its influence. Alan Turing, Moran notes, was bashful as often as he was brash. Agatha Christie, so bold on the page, was painfully shy in person. So was, when he was not performing leadership, Charles de Gaulle. And so was, when he was not performing music, Morrissey. Lucius Licinius Crassus, consul of Rome and mentor of Cicero, confessed to “fainting with fear” before delivering a speech. Primo Levi told Philip Roth about “this shyness of mine.” Oliver Sacks’s first book went unpublished because he lent its only manuscript to a colleague who committed suicide shortly thereafter—and Sacks was too shy to ask the man’s widow for the book’s return. Shyness—at its core, perhaps, an uneasy acknowledgement of the vast distance that separates one human mind from another—has long been a companion to people and their endeavors. We might not all define ourselves to be among les grandes timides, as the French psychiatrist Ludovic Dugas preferred to call them; for some of us, timidity will be an only occasional visitor. But shyness, Moran suggests, however it chooses to manifest itself—and the thing about shyness is that the person who experiences it will have practically no say in the matter—can be a benefit as well as a curse. The shy are frequently thoughtful and occasionally brilliant. They are often sensitive to the needs, and the gaze, of others. The problem is that they live in a world that, despite the commonality of shyness, has extremely little patience for it. Moran, who is British, counts himself among the timides; because of that he is aware of how difficult it is to be a shy in a swaggering world. He also knows what a quietly radical proposition it is to celebrate shyness. The far more fashionable thing— particularly in Britain, where Shrinking Violets was initially published, and even more so in the United States—has been to treat shyness as a problem to be treated and then, if at all possible, never mentioned again. Shyness, so emotionally adjacent to shame, is often also regarded as a cause for it. Within a culture that so deeply values self- confidence—and that takes for granted that social skills are external evidence of one’s internal self-regard—shyness is seen with suspicion. Quietness, in a world that is loud, can make for an easy enemy. In 1997, at a meeting of academics in Cardiff, Wales, that doubled as the first international conference on shyness, Philip Zimbardo, the eminent psychologist, made an argument that was at once provocative and unsurprising: Shyness, he contended, was becoming an epidemic. Under the influence of digital technology and its attendant affordances—internet, email, ATMs—the “social glue” that had bound earlier generations into networks of enforced community and cooperation was dissolving. The insights Zimbardo had gleaned from his Stanford Prison Experiment had taken a new turn: Channeling the work of Sherry Turkle and Robert Putnam, he had begun to worry that technology, all the ways humans had invented to avoid each other, would ultimately exacerbate shyness. By the year 2000, Zimbardo figured, it would be possible to go for a day without talking to another living person. We were entering, he warned, “the new ice age.” RELATED STORY Saving the Lost Art of Conversation It remains to be seen whether the gossamer outgrowths of the World Wide Web will liberate or ensnare us. But “the new ice age,” as a concept, Moran suggests, tapped neatly into long-standing ideas about the nature of shyness: that it is not just an emotional response to others, but, more specifically, an emotional response to the conditions of modern life. In this reading of human history, shyness is an emotion that was also, to some extent, an invention. The scholar Ormonde Maddock Dalton, an archaeologist and a curator at the British Museum in the early 20th century, believed shyness, along these lines, to be a byproduct of civilization. Beasts and barbarians, Dalton pointed out, do not have the luxury of timidity if they are to survive in their respective wilds; people who are concerned merely with the most basic of needs—food, shelter, reproduction—will have little practical use for the self-consciousness required of shyness. (Charles Darwin, who nurtured throughout his career an interest in the emotions of animals, remained perplexed about the evolution of shyness—“this odd state of mind,” he called it—in humans. How had evolution, Darwin wondered, bequeathed humanity with a condition that had so little obvious use in nature? Darwin was led to such wonderings, in part, because he, too, found himself occasionally plagued with shyness.) For Dalton, shyness was the result not just of civilization itself, but of one of its byproducts: life lived as a kind of never-ending performance. It was an idea inspired not by Erving Goffman (or, for that matter, by his fellow sociologist Norbert Elias, who would offer a similar shyness-is-modern argument around the same time); instead, for his inspiration, Dalton looked to the large group of people he considered partially responsible for the rise of all the artifice: women. Their tendency to turn life into a series of staged scenes, Dalton believed, would—it was only logical—create conditions within which those shows could fail. Thus, shyness, which is among so much else the self-conscious awareness of the many, many ways that human interaction can go wrong. Dr. Zimbardo warned that shyness, given all the ways humans have invented to avoid each other, was becoming an epidemic. Dalton’s ideas live on, today, in the broad recognition, within anthropology and far beyond, that shyness will have cultural components as well as physiological.

Load more