Geek Heresy (42 page)

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Differences along these lines lead to vastly different levels of attainment even in the developed world, simply because they act as barriers between social classes, as Bourdieu (1979 [1984]) emphasizes. For example, personal initiative and effort are underappreciated with some consistency in communities that rarely
witness upward social mobility. Oscar Lewis (1961) cites “resignation and fatalism based upon the realities of their difficult life situation” as one of many characteristics he observed in impoverished communities.

Coleman et al. (1966) report on the status of US education, where they found that children from disadvantaged backgrounds were more likely to believe that luck matters more than individual effort. The report was a landmark study of the state of American public education, particularly with respect to its effectiveness on different racial groups. It confirmed the importance of parental educational status and documented the relatively small role that schools played to equalize incoming disparities in academic achievement among students. Among its most interesting findings was a disparity in how different racial groups felt about their sense of control over their lives. In response to statements such as “Good luck is more important than hard work for success,” and “Even with a good education, I’ll have a hard time getting the right kind of job,” disadvantaged groups were more likely to agree compared with the white, middle-class majority. The report also strongly suggests that these differences are a factor of the environment – upbringing and education – and argues against segregation. The verbatim summary:

“The responses of pupils to questions in the survey show that minority pupils, except for Orientals, have far less conviction than whites that they can affect their own environments and futures. When they do, however, their achievement is higher than that of whites who lack that conviction. Furthermore, while this characteristic shows little relationship to most school factors, it is related, for Negroes, to the proportion of whites in the schools. Those Negroes in schools with a higher proportion of whites have a greater sense of control. Thus such attitudes, which are largely a consequence of a person’s experience in the larger society, are not independent of his experience in school.”

A similar emphasis on luck has been reported in other cultures. Research such as Henrich et al. (2004) and Jakiela et al. (2012) find similar luck-focused beliefs common among poor communities, such as in the Peruvian Amazon and rural Kenya. Of course, the belief that effort goes unrewarded is often a survival mechanism for conserving energy and minimizing despair, but it is a self-defeating prophecy that reaffirms the status quo.

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“Practical wisdom” as defined by Schwartz and Sharpe (2010) is very close to the concept of discernment that I am defining in this chapter.

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With regard to individuals, there is a rich line of research in the psychology of self-control (explored under various names, such as executive function, self-discipline, self-regulation, delay of gratification, and willpower), as well as in its pathological absence (such as akrasia, the breakdown of will, self-defeating behavior, and, in an extreme form, addiction). Academic experts sometimes make fine distinctions between these terms, but the concepts are closely related. Among those who
champion the primacy of willpower are Walter Mischel, George Ainslie, and Roy Baumeister. Mischel is best known for his “marshmallow experiment” which demonstrated that young children who were able to delay gratification by giving up an immediate reward for a larger reward later grew up to be more successful in school and life than their peers who were not. See Shoda et al. (1990) and Mischel and Shoda (1995). Baumeister and his colleagues confirm that self-control is a predictor for better health, education, and employment, and further find that greater amounts of it as a character trait appear to confer a consistent advantage in life. See, for example, Tangney et al. (2004). Baumeister and Alquist (2009) also argue that self-control is an unmitigated good in the sense that having more capacity for it has no drawbacks (e.g., having more self-control doesn’t mean overusing self-control). A very readable summary of Baumeister’s findings occurs in Baumeister and Tierney (2011). Ainslie (2001) looks at the dark side of lack of willpower. He is known for proposing “hyperbolic discounting” to model how people consistently prefer a near-term reward far more than they ought to, at least as expected by standard economic models of time discounting.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister, whose seminal work on self-control has reinvigorated modern science’s interest in the concept of willpower, finds that all effortful human activity – e.g., dieting, concentrated thinking, physical exertion, and emotion regulation – draws on the same physiological reservoir of will, one linked to glucose in the bloodstream. Meanwhile, studies confirm that low self-control leads to “compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger” (Baumeister and Tierney 2011). Baumeister distinguishes between “trait self-control” and “state self-control.” If self-control is a reservoir of water, trait self-control is the total capacity of the reservoir, and state self-control is how much water is left at any given point. With respect to individual self-control, we should make efforts to raise trait self-control.

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Emotional intelligence is the concept popularized by Daniel Goleman (1995). To the degree that emotional intelligence is about intention, discernment, and self-control, it overlaps greatly with intrinsic growth. However, Goleman’s concept of emotional intelligence also includes traits such as the ability to emotionally empathize that are not strictly necessary for intrinsic growth. It’s possible (if difficult) to be wise without having the emotional sensitivity that Goleman highlights. Economist James Heckman’s (2012) usage of the phrase “noncognitive traits” also overlaps considerably with the idea of judgment and self-control, but his definition lacks the element of intention.

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Intrinsic growth is internal to, and under the partial control of, the person or the society. Heart, mind, and will are neither external advantages nor
purely inborn talents, even though circumstances, genetics, and maybe even epigenetics can play a part in forming them. How healthy you are depends on your genes and the larger environment, neither of which you can personally control. Yet, you do have within your control the ability to gain the intention to have good health, the discernment to choose nutritious foods, and the self-control to go for a daily walk.

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Oppenheimer (2003) and Toyama (2011) both have strong things to say about television’s poor performance in education. Wilbur Schramm (1964), considered the father of communication as a field of social science, illustrates some of the high expectations of TV for international development in the 1960s.

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See, for example, Polgreen and Bajaj (2010).

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Peterson and Seligman (2004) provide a reference book that identifies twenty-four character strengths clustered into six virtues that the authors found to be valued by cultures across the globe – knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Assmann (1994), Takahashi and Overton (2005), and Yang (2001) provide additional discussion of cross-cultural issues in wisdom.

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See Paulhus et al. (2002) and Takahashi and Overton (2005) for two such lists. Paulhus et al. (2002) additionally demonstrate that people distinguish clearly between wisdom, intelligence, and creativity.

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I use well-known examples, but it’s very possible to be capable of high intrinsic growth without being notable or famous. I used to volunteer at a hospice, and a few of the nurses who worked there seemed like pure angels – they were deeply compassionate, highly capable, and worked long shifts that were frequently visited by death without losing their heart or their cool . . . and all with little praise or recognition. They were models of heart, mind, and will.

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I think of the three pillars as what are called “basis vectors” in vector mathematics. The bases of intention, discernment, and self-control span the total vector space of causes of virtuous activity. I should mention, incidentally, that I don’t necessarily mean intention, judgment, and self-control to correspond to physiological or psychological constructs. They are philosophical concepts around which to organize a theory of social change. It may very well turn out that good judgment, for example, is a complex combination of twenty-three separate mental faculties, seven of which also underlie good intentions. So, while the three pillars are conceptually independent, in our brains the wiring may be interconnected. For example, there’s a large and convincing body of research suggesting that greater self-control leads away from criminality and toward prosocial behavior, which means that expressed intentions themselves might change through greater self-control (e.g., Ainslie 2001). What we often call enlightened self-interest might be a case of selfish intention combined with discernment that leads to less selfish intention in practice. The psychology matters to the extent that we need to
understand it to nurture the traits; but for the sake of social change, it’s the final, expressed traits that matter. Whether you volunteer your time to charitable causes out of empathy or out of cold, long-term self-interest matters less than the fact that you volunteer – the expressed intention is similar.

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Of course, good health also requires other things, ranging from genes and luck to the right medical technologies, but these other factors are largely outside of individual control. And if they’re a part of individual control, they will fall into something covered by intention, discernment, and self-control.

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See Bloland et al. (2012) for how the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention views the importance of health systems. The 2014 Ebola crisis was an object lesson in health systems, since the disease has no known cure as of this writing, yet there was a huge difference in death rates between those who were treated in Africa and those who were treated in America. Global health luminary Paul Farmer noted that there was a “know-do gap” between what we know we should be doing and what actually gets done; much of that gap is due to weak health systems (Achenbach 2014).

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I-TECH (2011).

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Bendavid and Bhattacharya (2009).

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Walensky and Kuritzkes (2010).

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2008); Colindres et al. (2008).

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For another such example in public health, see Toyama (2012), which is about Aravind Eye Hospital and its emphasis on staff and organizational intrinsic growth.

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I fail in this book to sufficiently stress collective action and its critical role in social change. That is partly because of limits of page count and partly because of the incredible difficulty of telling collective action stories without highlighting individuals. Based on what I’ve witnessed, however, unified group action is the single most effective way to address abuses and imbalances of power. Chapter 10’s Pradan assists self-help groups to engage with local politics for this reason. The Egyptian revolution was more than anything a story of collective action. Farmer unions and cooperatives support their members more effectively than any farming household can do on its own. But collective action again requires group intrinsic growth – there is no effective collective action unless the group has enough heart, mind, and coordinated will.

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Tara Sreenivasa’s story is based on my interviews and email exchanges with her as well as a paper questionnaire distributed to Shanti Bhavan students who were in the eleventh grade in 2009. Dmitry Kogan, an intern who worked with me to conduct a study of English-language learning across several schools, administered the questionnaire.

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This phrasing is used in the Constitution of India (2011), Part XVI, Clause 340.

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Detailed descriptions of Shanti Bhavan are provided in George (2004). Thomas Friedman (2005) wrote about Shanti Bhavan in
The World Is Flat
; his daughter was a volunteer.

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George (2004) is part memoir and part social critique. It describes George’s extensive efforts to build Shanti Bhavan and other institutions and programs – a medical center, a campaign against lead poisoning, a journalism school, etc.

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Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2004).

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Mandela (2003).

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Citations have been removed from this quotation from Patrinos (2008). See also Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2004).

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Education is close to being a silver bullet, but it’s not quite: Because the human qualities essential to an effective education aren’t easily replicable, good education as a whole cannot be a packaged intervention. Textbooks are packaged interventions; laptops are packaged interventions; school buildings are packaged interventions; laws for mandatory schooling are packaged interventions. But good education itself is not. For tremendously inspiring stories of the value of girls’ education, see Kristof and WuDunn (2009).